Presence and the Political: Performing Human 3030594866, 9783030594862

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Presence and the Political Performing Human Farhang Rajaee

Presence and the Political

Farhang Rajaee

Presence and the Political Performing Human

Farhang Rajaee Department of Political Science Carleton University Ottawa, ON, Canada

ISBN 978-3-030-59486-2 ISBN 978-3-030-59487-9 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59487-9 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Maram_shutterstock.com This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

To Rumi The person who learned late in life that each soul has its own journey, whose destination is to appear in the world and make a presence worthy of narration and emulation by others and that this will occur in the political. And wow, what a presence he has left behind!

Preface and Acknowledgments

At the heart of this work lies a concern with how humanity performs toward itself and how it performs within the public realm, where it must be in relations with others. Public life is not solely about politics but also the political, i.e., intellectual, moral, economic, religious, collective habits—including fashions and amusements, artifacts, histories, and legacies. Hence, the title for the book is Presence and the Political, with the subtitle of Performing Human, because the research proved to me that successful moments of presence in the political amount to performing human through the flourishing and transpiring of combined human faculties, which in turn produces civitas or a paradoxical civilized context of individuality and plurality. Right at the beginning, I would like to emphasize that “presence” is different from mere “appearing.” Socrates advocates for “presence,” by which he means “appear to yourself as you like to appear to others.” Machiavelli advocates for “appearance,” by which he means “appear as you wish to be because your true self is irrelevant to the world, only appearance counts” (Arendt 1990: 98–104). That is why people with the temperament of Socrates have produced civitates while people with the temperament of Machiavelli have produced worldly glory and imperial powers. It is no wonder, then, that the general assumption is that before one begins to perform and act human, one must overcome challenges one faces on the path of such undertakings, including a lack of resources, knowledge, struggle of power, and the like. Then, there are

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challenges such as misconceptions, confusion, and a lack of clear thinking. For example, during the first few months of COVID-19, even though humans have experienced many pandemics over the ages, utilitarianism and concern for economic downfall dominated the conversation. Help for health workers had to be debated and defended in the Congress of the United States before being included in the relief bill. In fact, the conventional dominant wisdom focuses on economic crisis, terrorism, and the threat of religiously inspired terrorism, and now the resurgence of bipolar politics, as the major challenges of our time. There is a circular argument at play here, however. Notwithstanding the pressing and immediate urgency of these issues, I contend that generally crises result from and are the side effect of not acting human. To name the juggernaut accurately, the chief problem has to do with the moral crisis of forgetting how to appear to each other and in the public arena, the political sphere. Even various problems of physical and mental health, as well as environmental degradations, result from the absence of such presence. I am convinced that what lies at the heart of not only the present critical human condition but almost all human crises is the erosion of presence. The challenges mentioned above are simply its by-product. I hope to show how comprehending and internalizing the working of the conditions of civitas constitute not only the way out of the present crises but also point to the perennial nuances and rules that help each person perform human. While I deal with theorizing about the qualities generally considered human, I would like to point out that my design, to use Plutarch’s notion, is not to write theories or “histories, but lives.” I write about the mental presuppositions, ethos, and structures that foster living together as humans on earth in a way that is, at minimum, the least harmful to the self, to others, and to the earth, the quintessential human condition, with the ultimate aim of positively helping the elevation of individuals, groups, and the environment. I share the age-old wisdom that humans are not born and civitas is not a natural state, nor is it a praiseworthy moral and social status, but rather a necessary condition that requires deliberate meditation as a destination and an end to be pursued in and of itself. At the same time, to perform human is not a skill one acquires once, in order to materialize one’s potential for personal benefit and advantage, but rather it is an ongoing condition of conscious being, requiring constant fostering and caring meditation. Ostensibly, all other natural creatures are what they are from the time they appear on earth and remain so until they depart;

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a cat is a cat and remains so until its time is up. The case for human beings is different. To borrow the notion of “software” as a metaphor, human software is not closed, but instead is constantly revised, redacted, and updated. And there are a well-defined variety of social statuses that humans achieve; a given social status, however, is a product of a convention adjusted and modified by the contingencies of time and place and not a natural state. Even though on the surface humanity’s hardware has remained constant for millennia, each human being possesses enormous potential to transform the physical surrounding to satisfy needs and desires and has done so throughout history. The three great worldly discoveries, imaginations, and innovations of agriculture (in Mesopotamia in the fourth millennium BCE), industry (in Western Europe in the eighteenth century CE), and information (in North America in late twentieth century CE) represent major examples of such transmutations. Human software, however, does not function in a linear fashion and requires a leap of consciousness to enable it to rise above accidents of geography, race, ethnicity, skin color, religion, language, and history. Humans can be as brave as a lion, as loyal as a dog, as aloof as a cat, as noble as a horse, as dignified as a cow, as unforgiving as a camel, as un-forgetful as an elephant, as hard working as a donkey, as cunning as a fox; the list can go on. Unlike these animals, each with a peculiar feature, a human being can and does rise above any one of these characteristics and can even create an imaginative combination of them, by choice. Humanity has constructed these combinations and syntheses throughout history for one purpose and one purpose only, namely to flourish, which is to say, to become fully human and to perform humane conduct. To achieve this objective requires: 1) volition; 2) a coherent body of rules that guarantees inclusion and fairness; and 3) a space in order for the first two to manifest, to allow humanity to leave its mark as a civitas for contemporaries to enjoy and for posterity to appreciate or to emulate. These three working together also constitute the paragons of the political (Rajaee 1398/ 2019: 55–149). In other words, civitas appears when conscious and deliberate humans resolve to display and experience “presence,” when that presence interacts with other presences in a mutually accepted set of rules (“ethos”), the core of which includes, in Albert Schweitzer’s words, “reverence for life” (1987), and within an appropriate energizing space and structure (“the theatre”). Each civitas has and will experience rise, splendor, and collapse. The period of splendor exhibits the crystallization of all potentials. This book

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focuses on capturing the nuances and the working of that crystallization, because it is at that moment that presence and performing human appear in its finest. As such, this is not a book about “social” or “cultural” engineering. Instead, it portrays human resolution, deliberate acting, and active presence. This is different, however, from projects that could manipulate human development in certain directions. In principle, any attempt to engineer a society or a polity runs contrary to and is inimical to human ingenuity, unpredictability, and spontaneity. Thus, this book is an intellectual exercise in canvassing the anatomy of the moment when human presence and the political interact and generate, display, and cherish caring politics, fair economy, intricate science, nuanced society, imaginative epistemology, and delicate art, the various components of the political. Civitates represent moments of eloquent simplicity, but they are not simple tasks. I hope I have managed to do the same, that is, to portray the moment in a simple but not simplistic way. I have tried to observe academic rigor while making sure it is accessible to a wide audience. I hope I have catered to the connoisseur and the amateur alike. The two parts of the book capture the internal logic of the working of a civilization as well as offer portrayals of major historical examples where civilization has arisen across various world views. I could not have observed, deciphered, and made this amazing and wonderful journey through the imaginative experiences of human civilizations without the support of many institutions as well as the insightful comments of many acquaintances, colleagues, and friends. Any practitioner of scholarly and creative writing usually talks with excitement about what they do, and along the way enjoys the comments, constructive reactions, and even dismissive and cynical positions of listeners. Each one of these reactions is helpful in its own way. My adventure has been no exception. In the past few years, in various occasions and in many parts of the world, I have had such encounters. My home university, Carleton University in the beautiful city of Ottawa, has been generous in supporting my research as well as providing me a podium to share my ideas with students and colleagues. The Deans of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, John Osborne, and his successor, Pauline Rankin, as well as Shane Hawkins, the Director of my academic home in the College of the Humanities, have been supportive of my research projects all along; I would like to single them out. Then, there are some people whom I would like to acknowledge by name.

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In alphabetic order, they include the late Inis Claude Jr., Gholamhossein Ebrahimi Dinani, Susan Downie, David Clinton, Tom Darby, M. R. Ghanoonparvar, Marc Hanvelt, Paul Keen, Geoffrey Kellow, Amir Mirtaheri, James Milner, Fatollah Mojtabaei, Mostafa Nadim, Randy Newell, John Ryan, Mohammed Rustom, H. L. Seneviratne, K. C. Thompson and the late Kenneth W. Thompson. I want to take the opportunity to express my gratitude to the initiator(s) of the gigantic complex of matrices that have led to the formation of the World Wide Web, enabling me to access libraries, rare book collections, and materials; before the age of Internet, it would have required an adventurous expedition to remote archives to access materials I now have at my fingertips. I acknowledge my indebtedness to the minds of those who facilitated, for example, the conversion of printed books into PDF versions that I could access on my home computer with a click of a button, especially in the age of COVID-19. What a fascinating serendipity, almost every time. Being able to open so many PDF books on so many screens—desktop, laptop, iPad—at the same time is sublime. I would like also to salute the thousands of contributing editors to Wikipedia, who make it easy to access the information, dates, and so-called “trivia” that are essential to any creative writing or non-fiction enterprise. We truly live in a fascinating age, for which I am extremely grateful. It would be negligent of me not to acknowledge the technical assistance I have received during this project. Dr. Kelly Quinn kindly read the text and edited it before submission to the publisher; I am grateful for her keen eyes and vast knowledge. Several people provided technological assistance, either in person, or with “physical distancing,” that empowered me to manipulate the computer and the Internet to do my work and gain access to many resources in form of PDF books and articles. They are Koosha Farjad Cheraghi, Ehsan Karimkhani, and Stephen (Steve) Welch: thank you. I want to end the preface by thanking my three jewels of my life, my daughters, Bita Mehrin, Azadeh Nikoo, and Farzaneh Sheida, who were the agents of my own civilizing process, if indeed I have it in me or have ever been successful in “performing” it. Finally, I am indebted to each reaction to my ideas, cherish each contribution in forcing me to think clearly, and am certain that the work has

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improved as a result. As to the shortcomings that the final product surely contains, I alone am responsible. Ottawa, Canada Summer 2020

Farhang Rajaee

Reference Arendt, Hannah (1990). On Revolution. New York: Penguin, Reprint.

Introduction

I rose to human, when of animal status, I deceaseNo fear of loss, once for such a cause, I demise. Rumi (Mathnawi III: 3901)

History has recorded Friday September 8, 1978, as the date of a bloody encounter between the state and society in Iran. People defied martial law and demonstrated against the forces of the monarchy in Tehran, leading to death and injury; by some accounts, more than 5000 people were injured. From the vantage point of the state, this marked the end of civil order and the beginning of a chain of clashes between the Iranian people and the security apparatus, resulting in the fall of the ancient regime in February of 1979. From the vantage point of the people, a different pattern of life unfolded. Suddenly, life was filled with an enormous degree of cooperation and care. Happy faces, hopeful demeanors, cooperative interactions, helpful ways of being, and, in short, tolerance (religious, ethnic, cultural, ideological, racial, and gender) and courtesy dominated interactions everywhere. People would help one another without any judgment about whether one had the right beliefs or belonged to the right political faction. Despite the absence of or disruption to public utilities such as electricity, water, oil, and gas, people shared whatever they had and made

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sure their neighbors had enough. Active religionists delivered food, gas capsules, and kerosene containers on their shoulders to known communists and to people of different ethnic or religious groups. People gave rides to strangers and went out of their way to accommodate others. The heightened level of good manners and mutual concern seemed to promise a future of civility and civilization production. Even though it only lasted for a few months, it was an unforgettable time. History has recorded Monday, March 12, 1984, as the day that the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) in England declared a general strike. Small and local strikes had begun earlier but this declaration generated widespread excitement, making it a nationwide event. As it is always the case in strikes, some miners did not participate, particularly in Nottinghamshire. The result was a violent clash between the police and miners at one level, and between some miners and other miners, at another level. The worst encounter occurred at a British Steel coking plant in Orgreave, South Yorkshire, in May, which became known as “The Battle of Orgreave.” Following the event, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher (1925–2013) declared the strikers were “enemies from within” who would create “the rule of mob” if they succeeded. The rift between the state and society caused deeper rifts still between neighbors and even within families. On the twentieth anniversary of the strike, the BBC News invited comments and solicited personal memories. The most striking for me was the following: Two of my uncles were on strike while my father and one other uncle worked. Since the strike, my father had spoken to his father no more than half a dozen times, all just before his death three years ago. I truly believe that if the Nottinghamshire mines had not been picketed before they had the chance to vote democratically, I would have had a chance to have known my grandfather and my cousins. They are strangers to me to this day. (Tom Mansfield, “Miner’s Strike of 1984; Your Memories,” http:// news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/talking_point/3528983.stm, retrieved April 2020)

The breakdown and destruction of civility and civil conduct happened as suddenly in England as it occurred in Iran during the revolutionary months. In both cases, the sudden turn of events points to the fragility and artificiality of occasions for either abandoning or performing human. The central idea at work in both cases, which came to life in the former

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and was destroyed in the latter, relates to the condition of opening in the first and closing in the second of pace for the coming together of humane presence within the political. In this book, Presence and the Political; Performing Human, I hope to offer an anatomy of such a moment, as well as considering some occasions when these moments have manifested in history. Although theoretical discussion and conversation appear to play a major role in the presentation of my findings, the work in fact results from studying and experiencing the costly and painful practical realities of personal and historical incivility. My earliest memory of a serious conversation about the subject dates to my eighth-grade studies in the 1960s in Iran, when a fascinating teacher of social sciences began his course with the question: “Why is our country in the condition it is?” To elaborate on the question, he portrayed Western societies as enjoying low mortality rates, managed population growth, balanced economies, healthcare, welfare, and other positive developmental indicators. He then identified the causes for “our own miserable condition” as “imperialism and its local lackeys in the form of corruptions, dictatorship, and despotism.” At the time, it was exhilarating to know our pain, its cause (even if distorted), the ideal state, and the solution, all at once. Fast forward to the early 1990s, after the Iran-Iraq War (1980–1988). Once again “development” is a hot commodity, and while I now teach in Iran, unfortunately the tenure and content of the conversation are the same as those of the 1950s. Then flashback again to a southern state in the United States of America in 1975, when I began my graduate studies: I am in a bank, talking to the teller about opening an account. To my great shock, the teller, with an apologetic tone of voice, inquires whether she has done anything wrong that might have caused my angry tone. When I object with surprise and say that I am not upset, she gently asks why I was shouting at her, even while claiming to not be upset. I was not aware that either my mind-set or my habits of mind, bred to the conditions I was used to in Iran, were causing me to behave in a way that appeared threatening to her. It took me a long while to recognize the accuracy of her observations. To be dynamic and developing, whether as an individual, a collective, or a polity, means much more than displaying quantitative indicators of low mortality rates and high life expectancy; it relates to a serious resolution to have presence in the political, whether locally, regionally, or on the stage of history. The condition of development represents

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the currency or a set of values that makes it possible for human beings to live as humans and interact with one another in a gentle manner, respecting personal, collective, and public spaces, encouraging interaction with one another with civility, and in short making possible what I call bringing together human presence with the political by “performing human.” Soon, I learned that those indicators that I had learned from my teachers and again in higher studies were features of a so-called developed society and were in fact the product of a more complex process I call civilization production. Moreover, I realized that the so-called developed societies were really the developing ones, since they were dynamic and were actively producing in imaginative and innovative ways. In these societies, most members work together toward a common goal, normally the common good. Further, those polities that were labeled “developing” societies were in fact countries that were in a state of liminality that I call being “busy conquering,” in which members strive to prove their superiority over others, while the state is focused on proving itself stronger than its own citizens or other states. These polities are, in the words of the Iranian philosopher Dariush Shayegan (1935–2018), “on holiday from history” (1992: 3). By “conquering,” I mean a self-righteous and self-interested mentality that leads to deadly competition at all levels, among individuals, groups, institutions, and even between state and society. Instead of concentrating on one’s potentials and one’s goals, everyone sits in judgment of everyone else. I wish it were a matter of individuality, but no: it is individualism in the worst sense of the word. Regardless of social or political position, everyone considers oneself at the center of the world while considering everyone else as a potential enemy. Self-righteousness is the rule of the game; everyone is either with me or against me. Personal goals, and often personal egos, dominate the public square, if such a place exists at all, hence the struggle for conquest. Meanwhile, “on holiday from history” means the condition of failing to proactively play a dynamic role in human interactions and not contributing constructively to personal, national, or the global life of human civilization. These societies are trapped in the dilemma of survival or enchanted by politics of revenge and aggression. Often, instead of engaging in civilization production, they are either busy destroying their own resources as well as all forms of human and nonhuman capital, or merely engaged in surviving and simply making a living. Following my immigration to Canada and joining the professional world here, I could compare the unfolding of life in a truly developing

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context, that is, a dynamic and producing context, with the experience of working in a region that was on holiday from history. Further, I realized that the features of a developing society are not specific to any actual manifestation of civility, such as the West today, but are rather common to all peoples who have embarked upon civilization production, regardless of historical epoch, whether in ancient, medieval, or modern times. I feel I have something important to offer by elaborating on the nuances and the mechanisms at work in each developing context. I wish further to discuss two concepts that are crucial to an enduring state of development: civility and civitas. Thus, I plan to venture into a theoretical inquiry into the anatomy of the condition of civility and civitas. What prompted me to embark on the research and writing of is this: on a beautiful autumn afternoon, during my usual stroll into the bookstores in the historic district of DuPont Circle in Northwest in Washington, DC, a book entitled Choosing Civility caught my attention. A cursory look at the book made me ask why a Johns Hopkins University professor had written this book in particular, in the capital of the most dynamic polity, the most fascinating open society humanity has ever established, and the core state of the civilization of modernity. The author claims that Choosing Civility aims “to make a persuasive case for making civility a central concern in our lives” (Forni 2002: xi). The book puzzled me: what was the relevance of this topic for one of the core polities of contemporary human civilization? What surprised me even more was the content of the book. It addresses a fine-tuning of the nuances of humanity’s living as citizen of a civilized context, but more strikingly, it deals with basic features of civility such as “be inclusive,” “acknowledge others,” and “respect others’ opinion.” The book even has a section entitled “What is civility?” Thinking back to my lifelong fascination with the question of the backwardness of my ancestral homeland, my engagement with questions about why the Middle East experiences such a deep moral and civilizational crisis, and finally my lived experience of “incivility” and “backwardness” as an intellectual and a teacher for more than a decade in the Muslim world (1986–1996), it became clear to me that development does not lead to civility, but quite the reverse: it is civility that produces development and progress. The two incidents that I cited in my opening to this introduction, one in Iran and the other in England, show that civitates are fragile, and that they require constant meditation, maintenance, thinking, and rethinking. Contemporary texts such as Froni’s Choosing Civility, along with older

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ones such as Spengler’s The Decline of the West, invite such measures. I call such works “diagnostic accounts” that point to signs of malaise, crisis, and decay in a constructive way to promote revival and reconstruction. I even categorize Karl Marx’s famous work Capital; A Critique of Political Economy as a work not aimed at undermining capitalism but rather as a painstaking diagnostic analysis of the shortcomings of such a system. At the same time, societies where such theories of demise are absent, and where critics do not have a chance to voice their views, face malfunction, crisis, stagnation, and stasis. For example, in the “Muslim world,” the last serious theoretician of demise and decay is still Ibn-Khaldun (1332– 1406). Now that the Muslim world suffers from imbalances, disorders, crises, wars, and failed states, instead of strong debate on causes of social problems, there is neither any genuine awareness nor any possibility of assessment, evaluation, and questioning. Any voice of dissent is easily branded as a betrayal or a voice of a foreign enemy.1 In the present work, I aim to offer an anatomy of those features that enable humanity to actualize its potential as human and encourage people to perform human. The magical mix presents humanity with an opportunity to experience energy, vigor, and magnanimity. What causes and comprises these opportune moments? More accurately, what dynamism is at work when those magical moments occur? Most scholarship on the study of civilizations concentrates on their rise and fall (see, for example, Ibn-Khaldun 1958: 3 Volumes or Arnold Toynbee 1934–1961: 12 Volumes). I seek instead to understand the internal logic of the working of civilizations at their zenith, to capture the rules that make possible the art of the ordering humans’ lives together well and that of performing human. I will focus on identifying the parameters of a given civitas. As a father, I have developed two sets of criteria that I used to ask my daughters to be mindful of in their behavior. The first set points to

1 The following case illustrates the point. In 1989, on the tenth anniversary of the revolution in Iran, a high official in the Ministry of the Islamic Guidance published a limited edition of a collection of interviews and essays called Yadvareye Fajr (Memory of the Dawn). The interviews and essays put forward a critical evaluation of and self-reflection on the achievements and failures of the revolution. The authorities did not tolerate even this, and the author lost his position, was deprived of any future governmental jobs, and was sentenced to time in the notorious Evin Prison. As for the book itself, the remaining volumes were confiscated.

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the negative values which should be avoided, and the second captures the positive values they should aspire to uphold. I advised them and even begged them to refrain from acts that are immoral, illegal, or threatening to their health and also encouraged them, especially as they grew older, to engage in acts that would bring them joy, serenity, and wisdom. I feel that if one is successful in achieving these, one experiences the vitality of being civilized. Philosophers consider joy, serenity, and wisdom as intrinsically valuable. They are valuable experiences, and to internalize them and to perform activities that lead to them help one to rise above the mundane, the accidental, and the transitory and instead to do things that might universally be recognized as important achievements and acts of greatness. Certainly, during those human epochs we have called civilized, a combination of these values is observable. I hope to present an anatomy of the features, functions, and the working of the conditions of civilized societies. In part I, I aim to offer a general theory of being civil that is descriptive, analytical, and prescriptive, without projecting any futurism or endism. Teleological and/or end-ist approaches have proven futile and outright dangerous. Humanity begins something, but the end can never be predicted or guaranteed. The overworked adage that life is the journey and not the destination remains valid and worth repeating. What I have done here is to contemplate the ideals and the ends that humanity has produced on its journey through the ages and will likely produce in the future, considering which have been the most conducive for the actualization of human potential. My hope is that such an exercise achieves two aims: first, initiating a conversation and second, serving as a compass, a model, a horizon in order to find an answer to the famous Aristotelian question of “how should we order our lives together?” For us, as creative, imaginative, constructive, and even destructive beings, such a conversation and horizon may reduce some of the follies that have caused human tragedies in the past. The theory makes general observations as to how humans have behaved and should behave, without being reductionist. It is well grounded in reasonable argument and in history, without being historicist. As the economic historian Karl Polanyi (1886–1964) observed, “Civilizations, like life itself, spring from the interaction of a great number of independent factors which are not, as a rule, reducible to circumscribed institutions” (1994: 4). What are these independent factors and irreducible values?

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Two that speak to me are: (1) human agency, by appearing and making its presence felt, and (2) the political, the latter comprised of the set of rules of the game and the arena chosen for those rules of the game to manifest themselves in what I have called civitas. Thus, civilized experiences reveal that they embody a set of values that function in harmony together in: (a) proper predisposition, focused mind-set or appropriate “mode of living” (the Modus Vivendi) of its individual members, (b) the habits of the mind, the social imaginary and/or “modes of doing” (the Modus Operandi) of the polity, and (c) the institutions or the Polis and/or the public and common sphere of its structures and organizations. The first leads to the emergence of a people with a strong sense of the self that I will convey with the notion of “presence.” The second facilitates interactions and creates decorum or a set of rules that become accepted etiquette, which I convey here with the concept of “ethos,” and the third makes possible the emergence of a stage or an arena for the people to display their presence and act out their interactions, which I convey by the image of “theater.” The latter two from the political. The dynamic interaction between presence and the political appears pragmatic and in some ways functional, but the nuances of that dynamism require that we give serious thought to what we are doing when we appear and when we try to act in the arena of the political. I hope I have done this kind of serious thinking here by studying the nuances, aspects, and the function of each of these elements through several triumviri and in terms of their working together in concert. Each three-dimensional element has an independent role to perform, while at the same time functioning as part of a whole. This unity within plurality in turn helps us understand and grasp the nuances of the civitas. I hope to capture the nuances and the creative rhythm of civility. On the surface, the components of each triumvirate may appear contradictory or jostling, but they complement one another and function in concert. Thus, a few words about my methodology are in order. To begin with, I have written a book for a broad audience. I have not, however, allowed the popularizing of sophisticated notions to erase nuance. I hope to combine academic vigor with accessibility. I hope to generate appreciation for civility and to help enhance the art and craft of civilization production. In my approach to the topic, I have followed the model of the German-American political theorist Hannah Arendt (1906–1975), looking at what humans have done and drawing from their experiences

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those aspects of human activity that constitute presence within the political or “performing human.” In her classic The Human Condition, Arendt defines the aim of her book as “nothing more than to think what we are doing” (1958: 5). In the process, she identifies three types of activities that humanity has engaged in, labor, work, and action, with the latter being peculiarly human. For me, these moments of action have resulted in what has been described as civility and civilization production. I am hoping to review them and distill from them the features that define those crucial moments. In the process of collecting data, I have used a comparative historical method of observing existing dynamic civitates, comparing them with evidence from historical ones, and then pondering them imaginatively in order to understand the actual working of a given civilized moment. I have worked with the following presupposition: powerful dominant post-modern convictions of constructed epistemology notwithstanding, I believe it is possible to have eyes unclouded by preconceived ideas, theories, customs, and traditions; human beings can rise above all these accidental conditions. Otherwise, any writing becomes expression of inner anxiety of one kind or another. As to the methods of analysis and of presentation, as mentioned, I have used a series of conceptual triumviri for each chapter. Independent of the historical and contemporary prevalence of three-part notions, I concluded that three-part notions both revelatory and effective. It seems that examining only one facet of an issue is inadequate, examining two factors shows both sides of an argument or principle, while adding a third gives true clarity to the analysis. My fixation with the idea of three came to me when, as a Muslim, I noted that God talks about three selves in the Qur’an; “the Inciting Self” (an-Nafs Amaara) (12:53), “the Rebuking Self” (an-Nafs al-Lawama) (75:2), and “the Tranquilizing Self” (an-Nafs Motmaena) (89: 27). As I will show in the next chapter, I think a combination of heart, mind, and soul represents the corresponding faculties for each of these selves, respectively. Their working in harmony—each performing its peculiar function to the measure dictated by time and place—leads to the creation of a civilized person and a civitas. At the same time, looking over the horizon of human achievements in all traditions, the concomitant functioning of the three seems to produce a magical category. For example, in the Christian tradition, many references in the Bible point to groups of three (Thessalonians 5:23; Hebrews 4:12; Isaiah 10:18; Matthew 10:28; Luke1:46,47;

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Samuel 5:8; Job 6:7; Psalm 86:4; 139:14; Song of Solomon 1:7; Lamentations 3:20; and the Corinthians 14:14). Further east, ancient Indians talk of a threefold human value system or tri-varga: kama (pleasure), artha (prosperity), and dharma (propriety), respectively, whose working in combination may help one to achieve Moksha (ultimate liberation). Taoists point to the great triad of the Earth, Humans, and Heaven. In the Hellenic world, Plato and Aristotle have used three-parted categories for analyzing the human condition. For example, in Phaedrus, Plato invokes the three-part notion in his allegory of the composite of two horses and the charioteer (246b). Similarly, when he wants to explain the forces at work within human nature and in The Republic, he elaborates on the tripartite makeup of the human nature and its corresponding three classes in the good city (book IV). Similarly, in The Nicomachean Ethics , Aristotle concentrates on human virtue by talking about the three forms it takes, two of which he considers excesses, and the synthesis between the two that produces the golden mean (Book Two). The latter is not simply a mechanical middle point between the two extremes, but rather the result of a dynamic interaction between the two, accentuated by time and place. Aristotle emphasizes the idea of prudence or practical wisdom in order to show this dynamism. He concludes his discussion as follows: “the intermediate state is in all things to be praised, but that we must incline sometimes towards the excess, sometimes towards the deficiency; for so shall we most easily hit the mean and what is right” (NE: 1109b). As I referred to before, the main triumvirate comprises the paragons of any given civitates: presence, ethos, and theater. As such, it shapes the content and influences the organization of the book. Following the first chapter, which contains a general portrait that can apply to any given civitates, I will parse these three pillars across the subsequent three chapters. I will rely on a multiplicity of sources from various disciplines including philosophy, mythology, religion, history, and politics, in order to capture the internal logic of each notion, so as to clarify its meaning, complexity, components, and consequence. As such, Chapter 2 of the book concentrates on presence and focuses on an anatomy of the various triumviri that shape presence. Chapter 3, on ethos, unpacks the meaning of the rules of the game or the modus operandi of a given civilized context. And Chapter 4, on praxis, delineates an anatomy of the various organizational structures that form the public sphere (in short, the theater) for a given civilization, which provides a space for the working of presence and ethos together.

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Since history shows that civility does not belong to any period or any culture, in the second part of the book, I will provide examples of civitates from various human epochs. Human life on earth neither offers a tabula rasa nor assumes a fait accompli. If each iteration of society were a tabula rasa, each generation would be deprived of the rich traces, experiences, and trials and tribulations that past generations have left behind. Meanwhile, if we saw each society’s direction as a fait accompli, we would either ignore or suppress all potential imagination, ingenuity, and innovation. Instead, I show that insightful clues from the past offer opportunities for the future by presenting accounts of examples of civitates that have arisen under both cosmological world views and a secular weltanschauung. In each example, I focus on the meaning and content of presence, ethos, and theater for that civitates. I maintain that three major worldviews, ways of thinking, or outlook have accompanied humanity in its history, and in any given epoch, one of these is dominant. The first seems to believe in the wholeness and the holiness of the totality of existence or a sacred order. There may be a deity or deities present, but the central notion is the holiness inhering in every aspect. This view has predominated in many ancient societies, in Eastern religions, and among First Nations people, as a way of relating to themselves, to the other, and to the world. I use the term “divineimmanence” for this phenomenon. The second worldview affirms the idea of wholeness and holiness but assigns and credits this state to the creation of an omnipotent single God. The Western religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam center on such a God, for which I utilize the notion of “the divine-transcendence.” And the third believes in wholeness but not natural holiness and/or the work of any deity, but rather is based on human will, imagination, and effort. I have used “human-immanence” to indicate this worldview. As such, when choosing examples of civitates, I have used these three narratives as a criterion. The second part of the book, therefore, consists of three chapters that look at examples of civilizations based on each of these three worldviews. In Chapter 5, I concentrate on an example of divine-immanence. Here, I have used familiarity and expertise to guide my choice of example. For the first, I have focused on the Persians since it is the world of my ancestors. In Chapter 6, I will focus on the Mughal civilization in India, a civilization produced based on a worldview that emphasizes divine-transcendence. This Muslim civilization emerged in the context of divine-immanence and multiplicity of the gods. In Chapter 7,

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I focus on the modern secular civilization that emphasizes a world with accent on human-immanence. I claim that the United States best manifests the civilization of modernity, even more pointedly than Europe, where modernity originated. Also, I can claim some familiarity with the United States because I did my advanced studies there. Moreover, I have been teaching the civilization of modernity for the past two decades. In all three cases, the notion of presence for divinities, God, and human means they are the source of legitimating the socio-political order, i.e., any decisions made or the meaning the societal “good” must meet their approval. For elaborating on “presence” in each example, I have concentrated on two figures, neither radical revolutionaries nor the conservative reactionaries, but prudent statesmen who made an enduring difference. The two are (1) a conqueror with a vision and (2) a statesman with a vision. The first “makes” the polity and the second “saves” the polity by turning it into a civitas. Both do “the right thing and do the right thing, the right way.” The right thing for the first in the political means thinking of making something big and for the second means to make that thing great. The first term refers to heroes in the phase of seeking, capturing, and amassing means for something big and leaving a lasting impression, here and now, hence the tendency toward acquisition of wealth, power, and prestige that leads to the formation of the rules of the game and the theater; the second type refers to heroes who see their mission as maintaining the theater and enhancing the ethos for their particular polity so as to facilitate the presence in the political, for stories to be narrated for a long time. Then, I expand on the features and functioning of them in their respective civitates. While my personal experiences in Iran, my expertise in the political thought of Islam, and my graduate studies and professional experience in the West form the foundation of my deliberations, none of these can substitute for serious research. Accordingly, I traveled to Iran, Greece, India, Turkey (Western region, Lydia), and the United States to immerse myself into these cultural milieus further. I also conducted a research trip to Southern Spain (Andalusia) to observe the remains of the Moorish civitas, and what a glorious experience that was. At its heyday, the Moorish civilization was a marvel, with the tenth-century Saxon poet, playwright, and historian Hrotsvit of Gandersheim (935–1002) calling its capital Cordoba “the brilliant ornament of the world” (cited in Menocal 2002:

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32). In the end, however, I took the Mughals as one of my paradigmatic examples because they succeeded in creating a civitas with a divinetranscendence worldview in a society where divine-immanence dominated for millennia.

Sources Cited Arendt, Hannah. 1958. The Human Condition. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Froni, P. M. (2002). Choosing Civility; The Twenty-Five Rules of Considerate Conduct. New York: St. Martin’s Griffin. Ibn Khaldun. 1958. The Muqaddimah; An Introduction to History. Translated from the Arabic by Franz Rosenthal. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 3 volumes. Menocal, Maria Rosa. 2002. The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews, and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain. New York: Little, Brown. Polanyi, Karl. 1994. The Great Transformation; the Political and Economic Origins of our Time. New York: Beacon Press, first edition 1944. Shayegan, Dariush 1373/1994. Taitilat dar Tarikh, (On Holiday from History), Goft-o-Go. 6, pp. 7–21 Toynbee, Arnold 1934–1961. A Study of History. Oxford: The Oxford University Press, 12 Volumes.

Contents

1

Why Are We Here? Civility and Civitas The Good: Satisfaction, Achievement, Serenity Impulses: Freedom, Reason, Love Passions: Enthusiasm, Appreciation, Generosity Apparatus: Heart, Mind, Soul Ethics: Consequential (Utility), Deontological (Contract), Virtuous (the Good) Hallmarks: Conviviality, Allure, Balance Pillars: Presence, Ethos, Theater (PET) Sources Cited

1 15 19 21 24 28 35 38 43

Part I A Theory of Presence (PET) and Civitas 2

Presence and Personhood Agency: Absorbed, Abandoned, Aware Selfhood: Isolation, Loneliness, Solitude Emotion (Love): Longing, Wholeness, Immortality Logos (Reason): Utilitarian, Demonstrative, Normative Spirit: Authenticity, Tenacity, Reverence Commitment: Personal, Collective, General Conduct: Labor, Work, Action Sources Cited

49 54 60 65 70 74 79 82 86 xxvii

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Ethos and Mechanisms Temporal Scope: Past, Present, Future Human Spheres: Economy, Society, Polity Societal Realms: Private, Social, Public Approaches: Inclusive, Meritocratic, Isonomic Ends: Integrity, Achievement, Flourishing Mechanisms: Participation, Due Process, Dialogue Freedom: Negative, Affirmative, Assertive Sources Cited

89 95 99 103 106 109 113 117 123

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Theater, Structures, and Institutions Governance: Recognition, Friendship, Reverence/Glory Politics: Opportunity, Transparency, Uniformity Economy: Imagination, Cooperation, Compassion Society: Individuality, Collectivity, Commonality Culture: Family, State, the World Education: Perception, Knowledge, Authenticity Sources Cited

125 128 132 137 141 145 149 154

Part II

Praxis, Civitates in History

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The Persians: a Civitas of Divine-Immanence Presence: Soldiers of the Good; Cyrus and Darius Ethos: Cosmos, Warrior, the Path of Happiness Theater; the Monarchy, Social Classes, Tributary Economy Sources Cited

159 160 170 179 189

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The Mughals: a Civitas of Divine-Transcendence Presence: Submitter to Godly Life; Babur and Akbar Ethos: Divine Religion, Universal Conciliation, Welfare of Mankind Theater: The Monarchy, Social Classes, and the Guided Mode of Production Sources Cited

191 194

The Americans: a Civitas of Human-Immanence Presence: Officer of the Good; Washington and Lincoln

223 228

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205 213 221

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Ethos: Libertatis, Isonomy, Novus Ordo Saeclorum Theater: The Nation, the Citizens, the Entrepreneurs Sources Cited

242 252 261

Final Thoughts Sources Cited

263 270

Index

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About the Author

Farhang Rajaee (b. 1952) is an Emeritus Professor of Political Science and Humanities at Carleton University, Canada. His first book captures the political and international thought of Khomeini, the leader of the first non-Western classic revolution (Islamic Values and World View: Khomeini on Man, the State and International Politics, 1983). His work on politics of Ancient East captures the essence of politics and international relations among cosmo-centric traditions (The Development of Political Ideas in Ancient East, 1992, in Persian). His work on globalization captures the meaning of the human condition in the information civilization (Globalization on Trial: The Human Condition and the Information Civilization, 2000). His book on the interaction of Islam and modernity concentrates on this interaction within the context of Iran prior to and after the revolution of 1979 (Islamism and Modernism: The Metamorphosis of the Islamic Discourse in Iran, 2007). His recent book captures the working of morality and the political through examining the ideas and practices of one of the major twentieth-century thinkers (Kenneth W. Thompson, the Prophet of Norms; International Thought and Practice, 2013). Finally, his latest work Andishe va Andishevarzi (Thought and Thinking, 1398/2019) has two broad sections. The first part offers a meditation on the nature of the political as it relates and leads to sustainable development. In the second part, Rajaee offers a concise account of the contribution of nine major thinkers and East and West such as Hannah

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Arendt, Fernand Braudel, Ibn Khaldun, Leo Strauss, and Charles Taylor to the big conversation about the human condition and the way they have helped humanity in advancing civitas further.

CHAPTER 1

Why Are We Here? Civility and Civitas

Send a light for humanity, oh God, out of your beneficenceEnabling the human reason, thereby to recover its lost essence. Rumi (Sonnet 2544: 6)

“Man has always been his own most vexing problem.” With these words, the American theologian and political philosopher Reinhold Niebuhr (1892–1971) began his delivery of the prestigious Gifford Lectures in 1941, later published as The Nature and Destiny of Man (1943, Volume 1: 1). I think the most frustrating aspect of this “problem” pertains to finding a satisfactory response as to the questions of why humanity has appeared on earth and what humanity’s destiny is. Verily, why are we here? I hope to offer a theory of presence within the political in this chapter and hope that seeking an answer to the question of humanity’s purpose will facilitate the endeavor. I will begin with the most enduring answer to that question, offered by various religions. The most common formulation of it goes as follows: “We are part of God’s creation and appeared here on earth because we deprived ourselves of the heavens; now we have to strive to save our souls.” A plausible answer, but one that requires a giant leap of faith, which is easier said than done, particularly in an age of “God as © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 F. Rajaee, Presence and the Political, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59487-9_1

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option” (Taylor 2007). Hence, most of us still crave to know what we are supposed to do while here. We know what not to do, particularly when we are faced with danger. COVID-19 (beginning in December 2019 in American continent) made almost all of us stay put, do nothing, and keep “social and physical distance.” This gave us clarity of purpose, in the short term, at least. But short of such powerful forces, we are lost for direction. We may never satisfactorily find out where we have come from or where we are going. As the seventeenth-century Persian poet Abutalib Kalim Kashani (d. 1670) puts it: “Unaware we are in this world of its end and its beginning; the first and the last pages of this old book are missing.” Yet, without some notion of what we should do with our lives while here, we may be lost, confused, and unable to act. The question of why we are here remains important and urgent. Having a sensible response to this question generates a sense of drive, fortitude, purpose, orientation, tenacity, and resolve to empower and guide every sensible soul. What is certain is that those who possess clear self-definition not only experience real, genuine, and authentic achievements but also leave behind a legacy that others consider worthy of discussion, narration, and even emulation. So, what kind of legacy generates a story worthy of narration and emulation? Perhaps reviewing the legacies others have left behind may provide us with some clues. The sophists and the materialists of ancient Greece, the followers of Charvaka of ancient India (“school of worldliness”), Ming Chia of China (“School of Names,” claiming that only apparent things are real), and modern secularists have responded to this question by advocating an absolute indulgence in the desires of the senses and satisfaction through worldly pleasures. On the other extreme, radical and legal-minded religionists advocate absolute submission to divine commandments as they understand them. They advocate submergence of individuality to the point of annihilating any sense of the “self” through strict observation of moral certitudes they claim to be the manifestation of the Truth. Both positions hubristically assume that their understanding of the meaning of human responsibility on earth represents the final answer for civility and civitas. Both positions fail to capture the nuances of the human paradox and offer easy answers for a complicated question, because the first denies any reality beyond appearances, while the second confuses partial understanding of a given sacred message, available to mortal humans, with the divine Truth, beyond the reach of mortal beings. More tragically still, to use the distinction the German Lutheran theologian Rudolf Otto (1869–1937) makes in his book The Idea of the Holy,

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the religionists reduce the amazing numinous experience of “awing in its mystery” (mysterium fascinans ) into a sense of “fearing God” (mysterium teremedum) (1950). And while the absolute secularists deny any sacred or divine experience altogether, the absolute religionists reduce the divine mystery to avoidance of worldly suffering by unwittingly secularizing religion (Voegelin 1968). The problem is that none of these extreme responses accurately apply to human beings, because the first shortchanges human potential while the second demands humanity to be more than and/or different from what its makeup demands and dictates. Ontologically, human beings have a beastly structure (sensual and emotional), human potential (intelligent and imaginative), and divine aspiration (spiritual and moral). The combination of these three impulses makes possible worldly pleasure, happiness, achievements, emphatic relationships, and immortal experiences. Human beings are endowed with the potential of encompassing all three and often they succeed in integrating them to produce a magical mixture worth discussing, narrating, and contemplating. It is human to be extremely self-interested; it is human to be reasonable and feel responsible for a collectivity one has chosen to be a member of, and finally, it is also human to be selflessly empathetic and caring, even for one’s enemy. To perform human depends on understanding that one is a woven carpet with warps, wefts, and knots corresponding to the three aspects of the emotional, the reasonable, and the spiritual. We could even call them the natural, the human, and the divine. Thus, a more complicated answer to the question of why human beings are here may be as follows: Humanity’s raison d’etre is to materialize its complex three-dimensional potential in a balanced way. What happens when the emotional, the reasonable, and the spiritual manifest themselves simultaneously? They produce an organic combination of subsistence, quantity, and quality that I call civilization or civitas. To explain this, I propose that one should make a distinction between two forms of activities: One aims at “making a living” and the other, going beyond this, entails “making a life.” The distinction provides an important clue. To make a living, one has a job, a task, a career, a chore, a grind, and a routine to perform for satisfying necessities and/or facilitating easier survival; making a living is a reaction to the necessities of survival and a response to the desire for a more comfortable existence. It leads to the production and maintenance of materials that we need to subsist and to survive and can lead to production of material in quantities that make this subsistence more tolerable and more comfortable. “Making a life,”

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however, refers to a condition where quality has a presence and elevates life beyond the dry production of materials and quantities. If one dedicates one’s energy to making a living only, then there will be no energy left to spend on charms or values. No doubt, those who aim to make a living walk and talk purposefully with enormous drive, but the product of their work cannot sustain the soul and does not go beyond the satisfaction of bodily desires, material needs, or inquisitive mind. From the perspective of performing human and civilization creation, they are still engaged in mere survival. The Qur’an describes a person who is not concerned with elevation of the human spirit as someone who “will neither die nor remain alive” (87: 13), an interesting way of phrasing “mere survival.” Concern with elevation means being mindful of quality, which in turn softens rude, dry, mechanical, rough, and irritating aspects of pure material and even rational order of things. “Making a life” amounts to “making a living” with reverence. It is not just about making it but making it with finesse; one does not just drink the coffee, but mentally wakes up by smelling and tasting it. It is about appreciating everything, every step, and every occasion. It is doing the most mundane things with balance, effectiveness, and grace. “Making a life” conveys a sense of choice and deliberate action; it is an art, and the execution of any art requires meditation, thinking, imagination, practice, care, manufacturing, construction, re-construction, and refinement, but most importantly finesse, gentleness, and care. It also means thinking, saying, and doing everything as though it is the second time: As I heard once from a wise soul, “to do things right, one should do them twice, the first teaches the second.” The latter moves mountains and its echo remains alive forever. “To make a life” makes life worth “making a living” for. Most people have made and continue to make a living, but stories worth telling and re-telling are the account of “a life,” whether by an individual or by a given collective. Take the example of the ancient Hellenic world, one of the most continually discussed and debated human experiences. We know that there were more than a hundred city-states in Ancient Greece, the most famous being Argos, Athens, Corinth, Megara, and Sparta. Ostensibly, all the cities “made a living,” in some cases impressively so: Corinth became the wealthiest and Sparta was known for having an impressive army. And yet only the Athenians rose above merely “making a living” and “made a life” worth debating and discussing by all cultures and in all epochs. The main reason is that when one “makes a life,” the three dimensions

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of human potential—the natural (emotional), the human (reasonable), and the divine (spiritual)—find expression and they engage in an amazing conversation in concert, albeit naturally with constructive tension. The first is with the passion of the heart, assessing pain and pleasure or cost and benefit measures; the second is with the vernacular of the mind, measuring philosophical or scientific, verifiable or experimental true and false statements; and the third is with the vision of the soul, imagining and judging categories of moral right and wrong. Today’s science of the brain attributes the first activity to the right hemisphere of the brain, the second to the left side, and the third to the prefrontal cortex. I prefer the above-mentioned and more poetic notions of the eyes of the heart, the mind, and the soul. I will have more to say about this later but suffice it to say here that the three conversations in concert will begin and sustain “a life” worth narration. “Making a life” occurs when a majority (usually more than fifty percent of the people, more than fifty percent of the time) deliberately engage in the big conversation on the human condition, first in themselves individually and then collectively in the polity. This in turn allows humans as a species to perform human as cultural beings and perform acts particular to humans. These acts include the three processes of production/satisfaction, occurrences/achievement, and experiences/actualization. These terms can be used when a moment of equipoise in concurrent, comprehensive, and convivial production occurs. A concurrent occurrence refers to the happening of these productions all at the same time. It does not suffice to produce only one of them. A comprehensive production means humanity produces everything, i.e., the material (sustenance and welfare economy, order, and administration), the epistemological (data, education, science, and knowledge), and the nonmaterial (art, music, social relations, value system, sense of worth, hope, holiness, and quality of life). And a convivial experience refers to these concurrent productions with a spirit of festivity, energy, and liveliness. Convivial comes from the Latin conv¯ıvi¯ alis, conveying a feast, which in turn derived from the Latin conv¯ıvium, meaning living together, which again comes from the Latin verb v¯ıvere, meaning to live. Civitas or civilization is, in the words of the physician and philosopher Albert Schweitzer (1875–1965), “the sum total of all progress made by men and the individual man in every sphere of action and from every point of view, insofar as this progress helps towards the spiritual perfecting of individuals as the progress of all progress” (1987: 91).

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This achievement and progress do not occur one hundred percent of the time and are not achieved by or for everyone. The magical number in the modern world has been set at fifty-one percent and serves as a relatively good measure. In other words, when at least fifty-one percent of the people are active in the production and enhancement of life in a serious way for more than fifty-one percent of the time, the result will be a civilized context. One may say the difference of two percent, separating fifty-one from forty-nine, should be negligible, but quite the contrary, it is huge and makes a world of difference. The main reason lies in the fact that the fifty-one percent defines the term, sets the agenda, decides the criteria, and formulates the rules administrating the process. In my mother tongue of Persian, there is an idiom people use to depict current conditions in Iran that may help explain what I try to convey here. It is as follows: “Individually, we are fine; it is our collective that is intolerable.” The fifty-one percent conveys the condition of the collective where the reverse of the inner logic of that idiom may be at work. In other words, in a given civilized context “the collective is doing fine even though the behavior of some individuals may be intolerable.”1 When the collective is doing fine, the fifty-one percent defines the way of life in such a way that, in the words of English political philosopher John Gray (b. 1948), “practiced by a number of people, not only one, span the generations, have a sense of themselves… have some distinctive practices, beliefs and values, and so forth” (2000: 11). The will of the fifty-one percent rule, whether in the conduct of a person or in the behavior of a given society, necessitates that everyone or everything is assigned a potential value, regardless

1 This idiom also provides a clue as to how to characterize those societies where the “collective” is not doing well. I contend that such societies are in a state of liminality, in that they have enormous potential to get to the tipping point. The main reason is that human will to civilization never ceases to exist, even though it is often dampened and even blocked by the blinding forces of prudery, philistinism, fundamentalism, ideology, or utilitarianism. I feel it is even valid to claim that civilized contexts are in a state of limen as well because they may lose their sense of civility in response to any threatening event. For example, the United States lost its balance of civility in the aftermath of the tragedy of September 11, 2001. Only the robustness of its polity helped its restoration after a few months. No doubt, there are societies where the balance is not in favor of fifty-one versus forty-nine. It is fair to suggest that at any given epoch, one could observe the conditions of “Civitas,” “Liminality,” and “Decadent.” I have called the first a “developing society,” while the other two are societies that are either “busy conquering” where everyone and even the society are in a panic state against everyone, and/or altogether “on holiday from history” (Rajaee 1398/2019: 28–34).

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of size, volume, form, and shape. The ethos adopted by a person or a society is a paradox in that it has a broad definition of its parameters in order to include anyone who contributes, while it also has clearly defined demarcations so as to exclude any potential subversive element. This observation leads to two conclusions. One is that by civitas, I do not mean heaven, which is an impossibility on earth. The most advanced civilizations in any given epoch face problems and many injustices occur. Second, civility is very fragile and precarious, in need of constant care and vigilance. Any crisis, even a small one, may endanger balance, moderation, and civility. The key is the word majority, in that civitas means that moderation and civility occur most of the time and for most people, when there are enough citizens with vibrant and vigorous presence who are busy “making a life,” the working of a robust mechanism that facilitates that making of lives, and finally a solid space or theater in order to facilitate the interaction between individuals and mechanisms, and the reenactment of presence within the bound of the rules. In other words, civitas occurs where there are enough people committed to being active, the rules of the game are at work effectively, and the organizational arrangements facilitate the performing of people’s work and the enforcement of rules. Civitates and civilized people do not occur naturally; they arise from the choice of the path of qualitative progress. People deliberately choose to refrain from violating a given set of established standards; hence, to be civilized is to learn how to live and interact with others within the provisions of the set standards. Civitates do not need brilliance but common sense, and as attributed to the French philosopher François-Marie Voltaire (1694–1778), “common sense is anything but common.” A civitas is made of little things; a civitas is no little thing! It is truly a magical creation, when it occurs. Luckily for humanity, civilizations are not the property of any ethnic group, school of thought, epochs, or geographical area. Rather, they are the product of a set of values. In some ways, one could make the point that all civilizations are based on an imaginary and hypothetical contract, the content of which differs based on the epoch and the geographical location. They all share a framework that I call reasonableness, the most important manifestation of which is normative rationality, as will be elaborated upon, specifically in the next chapter. It is not at all surprising that the commingling of production, assumed quality, and style in all human spheres, namely food, clothing, architecture, business, social interaction, and even settlement of disputes, means that the civilized context sets standards, criteria, and measures.

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The Greek sage Eratosthenes of Cyrene (276–195 BCE) conveyed the idea and the importance of standards accurately when he echoed the Stoic moral principle of “vice and virtue” as a worthy criterion for the division of men, rather than division between us and them based on race, ethnicity, language, or worse, power and wealth. Contrary to the advice of those who encouraged Alexander the Great (356–323) to consider the Greeks as friends and all others as barbarians or enemies, he recommends the following: “It is better to employ, as division criteria, the qualities of virtue and dishonesty; many Greeks are dishonest, and many barbarians enjoy a refined civilization such as the people of India or the Aryans, or the Romans and the Carthaginians” (cited in Strabo 1960: 1.4.9). Only those episodes of human history that were guided by the standard of virtue yielded inclusivity and left behind civility and civilization. Personally, I have been fortunate to experience life in various conditions firsthand. I have lived under uncivilized conditions, where boundaries and standards did not exist, or were not taken seriously, or ignored and/or confused. I have experienced a revolutionary episode, when liminality and euphoria ruled and the air was impregnated with the possibility of blooming to a new civitas, and under a civilized condition where sufficient standards are upheld to provide opportunities for the life of the heart, the mind, and the soul to flourish in concert. Neither a particular people nor a particular place possesses a monopoly on these conditions; rather, these conditions correspond to the upholding or ignoring of a set of values by anyone and anywhere, pure and simple. This may explain why civilizations roll on their own wheels and endure for a long time, even after their core states have been destroyed and their actual physical existence has evaporated. Civitates remain the genre and the pacesetter, mode definer and boundary and framework maker for decades, centuries, and even millennia. A good example is the “most spectacular of all the memory palaces of Islamic Spain, the Alhambra” (Menocal 2002: 200). Its construction began in 1238 by the last Muslim dynasty in Spain more than two centuries after the destruction of the core polity of the glorious civilization of the Moors, yet it displays all the hallmarks of that complex civilization. The standard created by the Moors enjoyed the paradoxical feature of local/universal and thus echoed

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for centuries after its members had been defeated and even systematically expelled from Spain.2 Or consider the Mayan civilization that had its zenith two millennia ago. The core state is forgotten while its civilization still attracts attention regularly. Civitates are the opposite of empires, whose life depends on the presence and the protection of the core state and particularly the figure of central authority; often, the latter’s death or his refusal to defend the empire causes the demise and destruction of the empire. Many of us alive today witnessed such a downfall in the collapse of the Soviet Empire in 1989. The peak of the empire was during the rule of Joseph Stalin (1878– 1953) and its fall came when Mikhail Gorbachev (b. 1931) refused to support the life of the empire. Ancient Greece may present even a more enlightening, striking, and revealing example because one can observe the actual dismantlement of an empire and the crumbling of a civilization both almost at the same time in the hands of Alexander the Great: namely, the life of the city-states of Sparta and Athens, respectively. Consider this question: Which one of these cities produced the most famous, the most valued, and the most discussed human experience? Regardless of time, culture, and place, the city discussed and considered worthy of attention has been and continues to be Athens and not Sparta. The reason is that Athens produced all the things that humanity considers valuable, in the areas of politics, society, economy, and culture concomitantly and comprehensively, whereas Sparta is mostly famous for its military power. Not only did the people who lived in Athens enjoy the qualities it offered, humanity continues to enjoy the nuances of its contributions in the areas of governance, art, literary imagination, architecture, the art of fine living, and so on. Civitates are open, end of story! They create open spaces, break down walls, dialogue with others, welcome new ideas and different ways, and appreciate the contributions of others by embracing them. They are in the business of cultural receptivity and are engaged in mutual stimulation. I will point to a couple of indicators. One is the case of the vernacular. Empires chauvinistically guard their “mother tongue,” whereas a

2 In my first visit to Spain, I arrived in Malaga. Walking by the beach, I encountered a beautiful building that used to be a private residence, now a public space. The architect and design were so Moorish that I thought it was a relic from that time, but the house was built in the 1930s.

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civilization adopts one that serves as the broadest mode of communication and interaction. Often, that language is not the native tongue of the initiator of the polity that serves as the core state of the civilization at hand. The most striking example is the second round of Muslim civilization production from the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries. Muslims created civilizations in India, Iran, and Anatolia. The ruling dynasties of the Ottomans (1299–1923), the Safavids (1501–1736), and the Mughals (1526–1857) were Turkic, yet the dominant language in the three civilized contexts was Persian because all three realized that the accepted language of culture, commerce, and social interaction in the Eastern wing of the Muslim world had been Persian from about the twelfth century onward. Had they aimed to create an empire instead of a civilization, they could have imposed their specific languages, but since they aimed at civitates, they had to be open to a vernacular that was different from those of the dominant political elite. The other indicator of openness relates to the public sphere. A comparison with the Greek Agora and the Roman Forum clarifies this point. With neither gate of entry nor exit, the Agora meant exactly what the word suggested, “a gathering place,” whereas Forum meant what it originally described, an “enclosure surrounding a house.” It was an outdoor place for Romans to display their glory and power, but with controlled entry and exit. Note how the Romans changed the Agora in ancient Greek cities when they dominate the Hellenic world, by making sure it had an entry and an exit so that traffic could be managed and controlled. The modern equivalent of the Agora is the “public sphere”; the degree of the dynamism of one’s public sphere has an underlying link with the degree of civility. The present book offers a meditation on the constellation of the attitudes, activities, and actual spaces that translate into the mind-set, habits of mind, and institutions and structures that facilitate and maintain such “making of a life.” Humanity has adopted, instituted, utilized, and put them into practice, as reigning standards that, in turn, have produced remarkable legacies in the spheres of material life, art, architecture, imagination, human organization, and quality of living and interacting that continues to awe human minds, regardless of time, place, and culture. I hold that their aggregate amounts to a quality of human interaction we call “civility” and the production of a space among human collectivities that makes having presence and performing human possible. This is the space I have calling “civitas” or civilization. Further, I claim that humanity is here to live a civilized life and produce civitates, which occur across

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diverse faiths, theoretical lineages, worldviews, and cultural prejudices. As will be shown, regardless of time and place or the type of worldview (whether religious or secular), approach (historical, sociological, psychological, and so on), or methodology (structural, functional, behavioral, etc.), humanity yearns for civility and civilization because they facilitate fulfillment, achievement, and self-actualization for the individual as well as for the collective. The result is an experience that can be described with terms such as vitality, energy, vigor, and zest. Inspired by and paraphrasing the words of the American world federalist E. B. White (1899–1985) on democracy, I suggest that a civilization produces a feeling of privacy in the personal sphere, a feeling of active participation in the mechanisms and the process of day-to-day collective activities, and a feeling of general responsibility in the public sphere. White defines democracy as “the feeling of privacy in the voting booths, the feeling of communion in the libraries, the feeling of vitality everywhere” (New Yorker, July 3, 1944). The present book also aims to delineate the nuances that create vigor in the individual, encourage interesting rules of the game that groups eagerly follow, and foster structures and organizations that generate a sense of belonging and solidarity. I contend that these nuances manifest themselves in the working of a series of triumviri, applicable to and observable in every aspect of human life and in every successful epoch of civility and civilization. These triumviri are neither simply “ideas,” nor nominal references, but rather they are either realities or values that work in concert to shape, modify, alter, improve, and enhance the condition of civility and civilization. In other words, I hope these triumviri function as indicators of how civility functions and how a civitas makes performing human possible. Here, I want to be realistic about, sympathetic to, and critical of human history and try to discover what is at work when accord, harmony, balance, and predictability gain the upper hand. Note, I do not deny discord and calamities; I operate from the premise, however, that precisely because of our makeup as humans, adversity, trouble, crisis, disorder, stress, and even war are inevitable and they occur constantly, but also because we are human, civility and civitas are options and deliberate choices that can help us avoid those follies. In some ways, incivility has a role to play in the life we call human, but civility and civitas refer to a condition where we rise above those incivilities and make harmony and balance out of the dominant discourse. Here, I hope to generate a

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grand theory for how to rise above our natural instincts and move toward formation of a civitas. At the same time, I am not suggesting that these triumviri appear in the same fashion in all cases. While these triumviri point to mechanisms and methods that produce civilization, spatial and temporal factors temper and influence the degree and the content of those triumviri in any given civilization. Specific parts of the earth give rise to specific forms of what is considered valuable and what merits attention. Even for a given natural phenomenon, it is the geographical location that gives its significance and role. And of course, temporal conditions accentuate specific issues or factors. Thus, to be inflicted with temporal amnesia (about the significance of the past, the urgency of the present, and the promise of future) and spatial neglect (geographical, family, cultural, group solidarity, and heritage) amounts to a serious omission. For this reason, the suggested triumviri are not mechanistic manual of equilateral triangles that perform magic in all cases, because spatial–temporal factors influence the significance of each dimension at any given time and place. They provide major clues, however, insofar as human agency and its deliberate role in civilization building are concerned. The important point is that a triangle must be formed and preserved, even if one be isosceles and while another scalene and still another obtuse. The use of these triumviri will make my methodology here trichotomous. Each key notion I consider displays a trichotomy, with each component relating to and indeed corresponding to the next. Take the first two notions below, for example, the good and the impulses. Satisfaction relates to freedom, achievements to reason, and serenity to love, and so on. Before I enter the discussion of these features, a disclaimer is in order. I do not claim to reveal an undisputed truth or to identify the right or wrong ways, but instead I offer clues for a universal way to approach right and wrong. Indeed, I think it is impossible to adjudicate truth claims. It is possible, however, to identify a more realistic, practical, and historically verifiable way of studying how people approach truth, goodness, and righteousness in general. In other words, the bone of contention is not and should not be whether truth exists or not, and whether certain groups live by it while others do not, but rather, whether it is possible to ascertain truth with any degree of certainty or not. Categorically, I maintain that it is possible to state the following two general positions: (1) When one claims that it is possible to ascertain “Truth and Untruth,” the logical conclusion will be the dichotomy of “us,” the possessors of

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truth, versus “them,” those who do not possess it, with the consequence of the logic of “all with me,” and the means of conquest and submission; and (2) on the contrary, when one works with the logic that “Truth and Untruth” are concepts that are hard to grasp by any given human reason, we take the stance of “we,” including everyone as seekers of the truth, thus the logic of “all together,” through the means of dialogue, engagement, stewardship, and empowerment. I came to this conclusion by a heartfelt realization that we are finite beings living in an infinite world. Now, how a finite being could claim to grasp the nature of the infinite? I am influenced here by the Talmudic maxim that “we see things not as they are, but as we are.” This realization should humble us to remain seekers and not finders of the truth. Claiming to see the truth, and more dangerously to possess it, inevitably leads to exclusivity, intolerance, and in short, incivility, while humbly recognizing that truth is bigger than any one mind and even our collective minds, leads to openness, tolerance, inclusivity, and civility. Now, what is intrinsic to a civitas and civilization production? To be civil, one must go beyond what German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) calls the morality of “herd animal and herd instinct” (Beyond Good and Evil, Aphorism 202). Instinct breeds certainty, whereas civility requires doubt about the possibility of gaining certain answers for serious questions, let alone the ultimate questions about the human condition. To be civil, one requires resolution, confidence, and faith: the first to begin it, the second to persevere, and the third to have patience. Confident people have unwavering faith in their ability to face the challenges of life and truth, a healthy awareness of the complexity and ambiguity of the truth, and ample doubt about their ability to grasp the end, the meaning of it completely, and the possibility of delivering it. This may explain why such people journey through their lives with little or no anxiety or depression. The combination of strong faith and healthy doubt produces both desirable attitudes and behaviors in enjoying the journey. By contrast, non-confident people have unwavering conviction about clarity and certainty of life and truth, with little or no doubt about their own knowledge or their ability to grasp and implement that truth, and yet are filled with anxiety and depression about consequences; they are frustrated and angry that the world does not conform to the image they hold of it. Thus, the greatest enemy of civility and civitas remains the lack of confidence that ironically manifests itself in two apparently contradictory forms, arrogance and timidity. The Greek notion that

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philosophers were the lovers of truth and not its finders, and the Muslim notion that a good believer is not one who lives with absolute certitude, but rather one who functions within the parameter of “Fear of and Hope for” God’s mercy (the Qur’an 7: 56), are two clear expressions of this paradox. A philosopher claims to be a seeker of knowledge, and if she dares to claim what she expounds as the truth, she has already fallen into a dogma. Similarly, a believer is a seeker of God, claiming that humans all live under God’s judgment, but if she claims that what she says or does embodies God’s words or commandments, then she has committed the blasphemous act of declaring God as partisan. I confess I am writing with the conviction that there are categories that one can call human truth (regardless of their ontological sources) and the question worth asking relates to how one considers these truths to play themselves out in daily human life. For example, I believe that compassion is one of those human truths. It is as real as the sun or the earth and should be upheld for its intrinsic value, pure and simple. When compassion is exercised for an expected return, it reduces this truth to a bargain and compromises its intrinsic value. Just as one must be objective when trying to understand or analyze the phenomenon of the sun or the earth as a subject matter of scientific inquiry, so one must follow certain ethics when approaching human truth. I claim that history attests to two distinct forms of ethics, with opposing consequences for polities and societies. I have already alluded to them, but to make them clearer, one is “the ethic of civility,” which produces civilization while the other is “the ethic of self-righteousness,” which produces hegemony and empire. Whereas the latter requires zeal and enormous drive for power and domination, civitates require a combination of intelligence, creativity, and prudence. My claim is that when the struggle for power, the hallmark of empire, is tempered by care and civility, a process is produced that we call civilization production. The two ways of being are opposite insofar as they lead to two different ways of conducting oneself on earth, but they are intrinsically connected because both reside inside each one of us as a human being. Let us assume that the supreme good lies in the realm of metaphysics and the supreme evil lies in the underground, the earthly existence lies somewhere in the middle, naturally connecting both worlds. Both extreme virtues of perfection and demonic folly remove human beings from their humanity and are unnatural to humanity because they are neither divine nor demon completely. The common wisdom that states “the perfect is the enemy of the good” attests to this point. This realization, along with

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a proper understanding of what humanity should or may pursue, invites the question of what constitutes “the good,” a topic that takes me to the first component of my triumvirate.

The Good: Satisfaction, Achievement, Serenity What is humanity to pursue here on earth? What is the raison d’être of humanity’s existence? Since Aristotle is credited as the first teacher, I will look at how he articulates an answer to this question. In his Nicomachean Ethics , Aristotle defines humanity’s ultimate end as “eudaimonia,” meaning “the state of having a good indwelling spirit.” When and how does one feel this? Aristotle responds by stating “what constitutes happiness is a matter of dispute; and the popular account of it is not the same as that given by the philosophers. Ordinary people identify it with some obvious and visible good, such as pleasure or wealth or honor” (1095a). For Aristotle, it should include much more, however. The pursuit of pleasure, wealth, and honor is important and adds to one’s life, but humans strive for more. For Aristotle, this comes under the rubric of Eudaimonia (living well), and such a life includes virtue, excellence, and reason (ibid.: 1097b–1098a). What is the criterion for measuring these qualities? One can summarize it with another of Aristotle’s notions, namely telos, translated as end, purpose, or goal. For him, all beings are endowed with their own unique potentials and the nature of these potentials urges the agent to seek actualization of that potentiality. The combination of the potential and the urge comprises telos, which defines humanity’s very being. As he puts it: “what a thing is, and what it is for, are one and the same” (Physics. II. 7: 198a, 25–26). The first answer to the question of humanity’s end on earth, thus, is the pursuit of inner bliss. Aristotle’s teacher Plato offers another answer, namely the pursuit of justice. For him, the tragedy of the trial of Socrates shows that the Athenians had fallen short of living up to the ideals that humanity is created for, namely to attune their life with universal principles of justice (dike). In his famous treatise The Republic, he explains justice. For him, it is not a notion that can be described easily. Instead, he presents a detailed account of an imaginary city where people live by the principle of justice. This principle means performing “what is appropriate,” which in turn meant that “justice and would make the city just” (434c). In other words, justice means that each section of the city would perform what it is assigned to

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do. Correspondingly, in the case of individual human beings, each part of the body works according to its assigned function, harmoniously and in complementarity with the other parts, and in turn, each person does the same in relation to other members of society. The famous interlocutors of the school of Athens were the Sophists, who offered a third response, namely that the expression of human will, and autonomy constitutes the ultimate human end. Plato describes the most famous sophist, Protagoras (490–420 BCE), as having said that man is “the measure of all things, of the existence of the things that are and the non-existence of the things that are not’” (Theaetetus: 152a). Reality consists of what human senses verify, and beyond that nothing exists. Hence, caring for and responding to the imperative of the human physical and bodily desires comprise the ultimate objective of human existence. Which account truly captures the nature of humanity and its raison d’être? Ironically, Protagoras’s position may help in finding an answer. One could interpret his position as being that humanity was incapable of grasping anything beyond its worldly senses. As he writes: “Concerning the gods, I have no means of knowing whether they exist or not or of what sort they may be, because of the obscurity of the subject and the brevity of human life” (Cited from “the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy”). In other words, in the absence of our ability to comprehend the nature of being human, maybe each of the above positions can offer insight into what humanity’s goal might and even should be. To go further, I rely on the notion of each human “as a story-teller animal” to clarify humanity’s raison d’être. I borrow this concept from Scottish/American philosopher Alasdair McIntyre (b. 1929), who advances the following thesis in his classic work, After Virtue: “… man is in his action and practice, as well as in his fictions, essentially a story-teller animal. He is not essentially, but becomes through history, a teller of stories that aspire to truth. But the key question for men is not about their own authorship; I can only answer the question ‘What I am to do?’ if I can answer the prior question ‘of what story or stories do I find myself a part’” (1981: 201, italic added). McIntyre seems to rightly suggest that this essential character must be learned. What is important here is that he wants us to appropriate the experiences of humanity as we become human, learn from its areas of strength, and improve on the areas that need more work. Recorded history tells us that stories worth telling and worth participating in are those that reveal how to have presence and how to perform human, which takes the form of civility. Identifying what

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people have done during periods of civility may help catalog the end and “the good” that humanity should pursue. To make the response to the question of why humanity is on earth more mundane and practical, I turn to the stories that humanity has told before and see what values and ends those stories have conveyed, in the hope that by drawing on them one might be able to formulate some relevant goals. As a start, I turn to a story from ancient India, according to which the good or the high value is tri-varga (a threefold phenomenon): kama (pleasure/enjoyment), artha (wealth/ power and achievement), and dharma (ethics/ morality and righteousness). The first caters to the heart’s desire and generates enjoyment; the second invokes the calculating power of the mind and would lead to achievements; and the third observes the soul’s socio-ethical boundaries to foster experiences of uprightness and mental serenity. Some Indian traditions have emphasized one element more than the others. For example, in the epic of Mahabharata, the great warrior Arjuna passionately extols the significance of power/wealth: “Performance of duty (dharma), enjoyment of pleasures (kama), and even the attainment of heaven depends on wealth [arta], on which life itself depends” (cited in Datta 1967: 277). At the same time, another strong character in the work, Bhisma, contradicts Arjuna by categorizing wealth as a great evil. Then, there are the Upanishads that consider only those who follow the path of higher ends rather than worldly pleasures as worthy of joining the cycle of eternal being. Note the following from the Chandogya Upanishad, 5: 10.7: Those whose conduct has been good will quickly attain a good birth [literally, womb], the birth [or womb] of a Brahman, the birth of a Ksatriya, or the birth of a Vaisya. But those whose conduct here has been evil will quickly attain an evil birth, the birth of a dog, the birth of a hog, or the birth of a Candala. (Cited in Hopkins 1971: 44)

Which one constitutes the highest good for civility and in any given civilization? My answer is that this is possibly the wrong question to ask because those epochs or legacies we call civilizations have produced all three in the past, and future civilized contexts must produce them also. This is so because humanity’s makeup demands and requires all three. In chapter two of The Laws of Manu, we read the following: “(Some declare that) the chief good consists in (the acquisition of) spiritual merit and wealth, (others place it) in (the gratification of) desire

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and (the acquisition of) wealth, (others) in (the acquisition of) spiritual merit alone, and (others say that the acquisition of) wealth alone is the chief good here (below); but the (correct) decision is that it consists of the aggregate of (those) three” (2. 224). To summarize, it seems that humanity has needs that require satisfaction, wants that demand achievement, and internal longings that require the upholding of values. Thus, a moderate and organic pursuit of them is necessary, possible, and desirable. In a sense, a more important question to ask relates to what condition causes, encourages, and upholds such an organic manifestation. History and contemporary experience suggest that the most fruitful and affable occasion for achieving individual or organic goals occurs in a magical condition we call civilization. No wonder the Muslim historian Ibn Khaldun (1332–1406) used the concept of an unending chain of existence, with the world as the garden of this chain, to describe the constant development and construction in his theory of the rise and fall of civilizations (1958: I: 81–82). As a way of conclusion to this section, I would like to mention that civitates in the end display the triumvirate that the Roman author, architect, and engineer Marcus Vitruvius (80–15 BCE) identified in order to describe a good building: “utilitas, firmitas, et venustas,” that is, utility, strength, and beauty. Like a well-constructed building, civitates facilitate the craft of fulfillment, the science of achievement, and the art of meaning and realization. For this reason, the ideal destination for any searching soul in the past two centuries has been the region generally called “the West.” Those who want to pursue indulgence of passion and pleasure, material gain, scientific and artistic success, religious tolerance, and a sense of meaning feel that going to the West best enables them to do so. It is important to note that these various ends are pursued concomitantly. There is space, opportunity, and possibility for each and all, not just one of them. One should, therefore, concentrate on an anatomy of such a condition because it denotes a magical space, theater, or a stage where humanity feels enabled and proactively empowered to reach its set goal. It is where senses of vitality, dynamism, activism, productivity, initiation, imagination, freedom, and meaningfulness are experienced and encouraged in concert. The accent is on the notion of “experience in concert.” What makes such a concert possible?

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Impulses: Freedom, Reason, Love Civitates make the heart feel happy, the mind obtain satisfaction from its achievements, and the soul experience serenity, because in civitates, all three can manifest themselves, often in concert. The impulse comes from the desire of the heart for freedom, the appetite of the mind for discoveries, and the longing of the soul for love. What made the Abbasid era, particularly the reign of the fifth Abbasid (786–809) ruler, Harun ar-Rashid (763–809), so memorable, dynamic, and civilized? What was the “vital impetus” (elan vital ) of that creative era? I once asked these questions of a contemporary Muslim philosopher in Tehran. His answer first surprised me but made perfect sense. He said one notion explains not only the Abbasid’s civility but explains other civilizations as well: namely, freedom. It makes sense because no imagination is possible without freedom, and no articulation of imagination can take place without freedom. All civitates, past or present, display an enormous amount of freedom of thought, expression, and action. No doubt, however, even in the most civilized contexts, there are groups or classes of people who feel deprived of this right, but even that feeling of being deprived suggests that the society in question values freedom. As will be elaborated in Chapter 3, freedom takes negative, affirmative, and assertive forms and all three forms are needed for any given society. History shows that if a given civilized society deprives a group such as its visible minorities, ethnic, religious, or cultural groups, or women, the norms of the society demand that they present a compelling explanation for exclusion. For example, Athenian society denied rights to women and turned many people into slaves, but it explained this by claiming that both slaves and women deserved their lower status because they were less than human, thus not deserving of freedom. I do not suggest that such an explanation was right or justified, but only to point out that it would have been a contradiction to consider them “human” and yet deprive them of freedom. Even if such justifications seem ridiculous or hypocritical, it is possible to detect some respect for the virtues underlying them. “Hypocrisy is a respect vice pays to virtue,” the famous maxim suggests. Thus, civitates require, uphold, and encourage freedom, but the latter is not the only force behind civility and dynamism; it is necessary but not enough. The main reason is that if freedom alone reigns over everyone indiscriminately, it may lead to chaos led by the vagaries of human whim. I

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will never forget the euphoric months after the revolution in the streets of Tehran in the spring of 1979. People congratulated one another for the arrival of “the spring of freedom.” As a student of politics, I was aware of the horrors of the authors of The Federalist Papers and was wary of the risk of falling from the ditch of tyranny to the well of chaos. Day after day, I argued in vain in the streets of Tehran about the “unreasonable” condition of unchecked and unregulated freedom, only to realize that reasoning with revolutionaries was more difficult than building a castle in the air. It was impossible for them to grasp that freedom that is not tempered by passion and reason would amount to the tyranny of the first person to arrive in the street with a machine gun. I failed to convince the revolutionaries that passion would produce empathy and that reason is a sophisticated faculty that guarantees freedom by affording us wisdom, knowledge, wondering, discovery, imagination, daring, and, in short, prudence. When Plato and Aristotle considered reasoning the essence of what it means to perform human, they were not talking to or about the revolutionaries. Freedom is good, but when mixed with reason, it forms not only tempered virtue but also gives rise to dynamism in all spheres of being, notably the political (politics, economy, and society). Indeed, when freedom and reason work together, they lead to imagination, innovation, industry, and life production. By reason, as I will elaborate in the next chapter, I mean a three-dimensional understanding, which, as Aristotle reminds us, helps facilitate thinking. In my understanding, practical reasoning facilitates and utilizes doing, and moral reasoning facilitates judgment. In other words, reason takes three forms of rationality, utilitarian, positive, and normative that help one in any step one takes, whether constructive or destructive. Then comes the third impetus, which is love. The Anglo-American poet W. H. Auden (1907–1973) famously wrote, “Love each other or perish.” I feel love is much more than a necessary condition for human survival or for sustaining relationship with others; it is needed for the preservation of everything, especially all living organisms. In the Bible, love is equated with God: “God is love. Whoever lives in love, lives in God, and God in him” (John 4:16). In the Qur’an, the word love [hobb] appears 69 times, connoting various categories of God’s love for humanity, human love for things, human affection, and human love for God. According to the mystical understanding of Islam, love is one of the divine attributes. Indeed, insightful thinkers and philosophers

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have noted the centrality of love as the engine of existence. For example, the greatest Persian poet, Hafez of Shiraz (1320–1389), wrote “Whoever with love in the world is not immersed – Hold his funeral with my Fatwa as a living dead” (244:7). This may sound extreme, but it is not far from the truth, expressing as it does the importance of love as an impetus of civility. It is important to note that one should be mindful of the various meanings of love. The Greeks identified three forms of love: Eros, the romantic and the passionate feeling of the heart; Philia, the sense of considered friendship through the working of the mind; and Agape, the virtuous and empathic sense of the soul. I will unpack these more in the next chapter. Suffice it is to say here that a human being desires affection and compassion due to Eros, experiences fellowship because of Philia, and displays emphatic emotion for fellow humans due to Agape. This strong emotional energy creates a sense of warmth in humanity about itself, strengthens bonds between people, and deepens people’s connection with the totality of being, the political at its zenith. Indeed, Aristotle considers love and friendship the binding material that ties citizens with their government in his ideal polity (Nicomachean Ethics , Book 8). Freedom, reason, and love working together would lead to enormous dynamism, but would that be enough to create a civilization? Now, if there were enormous amounts of passion, instrumental reason, and freedom, such an aggregation alone might lead to the formation of a powerhouse, but not a civilization. One must therefore ponder the factors that turn this dynamism into civilization. What forms the grand desideratum of a civilized age?

Passions: Enthusiasm, Appreciation, Generosity Not all human productivity leads to the formation of either a powerhouse or a civitas: Many produce great ideas, doctrines, schools of thought, and even sophisticated cultural systems, but not a civitas. For example, Taoism originally emerged as a school of thought in China but has remained a set of cultural indicators and the bedrock of a cultural system. Yet, there have been many occasions when production of power, ideas, empires, and cultural systems have changed a society’s direction and oriented it toward a process of civilization production. For example, the traditions of the Muslims (twice, once during the tenth to thirteen centuries, and the other during the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries), the Athenians, the Chinese,

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the Indians, the Persians, and the Christians all led to the emergence of great civilized ages. What were the contributing factors? At first, I thought of creativity as the main feature, but history tells of great creativity on the part of many non-civilized peoples who did “create furiously” (Bell 1928: 71). For example, the Nazis were extremely creative and productive in their institutionalized ways of establishing restricted order and devising a complex and sophisticated system of exclusion and destruction. Human creativity must focus on those deliberately agreed-upon values that I elaborated above under the rubric of “the good” and stick to them with few or no exceptions. Positively, civitas happens when the grand desideratum becomes achieving the triumvirate of satisfaction, achievement, and serenity, and is pursued with passion by at least the elite members of the society. Bell claims this is what happened in the Athenian society of ancient Greece and repeated itself in eighteenth-century Europe. I surmise from his explanation that one could also formulate a triumvirate of “enthusiasm, appreciation, and generosity” (ibid.: 71–80). In his mind, the people of eighteenth-century Europe became excited about life in general, and thus appreciated themselves, others, and the world, and were generous in supporting high culture and the life of the intellect. The coming together of these values created a tipping point in the development of European history and launched Europeans on the path of present civitates, based on the philosophy of modernity. I agree with him and think that enthusiasm, generated by the heart, appreciation measured by the mind, and generosity extended from the soul, oriented the impulses of freedom, reason, and love, discussed in the previous section. A civitas is defined by key characteristics in more than fifty-one percent of the population. (1) They are enthusiastic about engaging in activities bigger than those that lead to making a living. They consciously commit themselves to make a life and take an active part in the collective determination to do so. (2) They also appreciate themselves first and foremost, and then value the potential that exists either in fellow citizens or in their environment. Each and everything and everyone have intrinsic value that deserves care and respect. In a cosmological worldview, this is so because they embody the God’s or gods’ creation, and in the modern universal worldview, they have natural worth or rights. (3) Finally, people are generous with their time, wealth, and effort to advance the cause of civitas, again in the old worldview to please divinity and in the modern

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to enhance the general good. Note, for example, that according to Statistics Canada, in 2013, 12.7 million Canadians or 43.6% of the population volunteered. If one considers the under- and over-aged segments of the population, who are not part of the workforce, this means that more than half of the workforce participated in volunteer activities. In 2017, the estimate is that volunteers contributed more than two billion hours of labor, amounting to a value of $55.9 billion in 2017 or the equivalent of 2.6% of the GDP (The Conference Board of Canada 2018: 4). It is no surprise that the attitude, mode, and mechanism of material production in civitates, both historically and, as one can observe, in contemporary civilization, relate to robust capitalism, where every aspect of life has “capital” value. Every tangible and non-tangible things that have slightest tangible value or material and non-material potential is cherished. A distinction between “capital” and “merchandise,” which gives rise to capitalism and mercantilism, is important and informative. A capitalist considers everything as valuable—obviously, wealth and power, but also reputation, ethics, fairness, neighborhood, qualities of performing humans. Mercantilists are generally fixated on merchandise—money, oil, pride, and so on. To me, the legendary, the cultural, and the historical icons of the latter are Scrooge and the Merchant of Venice. One may say that even these characters displayed the passions of enthusiasm, appreciation, and generosity toward their chosen merchandise. To go back to the distinction between “making a living” and “making a life” or between powerhouse and civitas, the mercantilists focus on “me,” whereas the capitalists focus on “we.” And the sense of “we” not only includes other fellow human beings within my civitas, but humans. Even more broadly it includes ancestors and descendants and demands respect for the past and the future. A sense of capitalism thus includes historical legacies and future promises. Bell is accurate when he writes: “In a highly civilized stage, the artist is neither hostile to nor mistrustful of tradition but helps himself freely to whatever it can give” (1928: 79). This attitude dominates; most members of the civitas have the same mind-set. A meta- or macrotradition, composed of local or mini-traditions, plays a major role in the way each person conducts herself and conducts her relations with others and with the totality of lifeworld. Together, these individuals form a giant orchestra, playing the harmonious music of “making a life” within the civitas. And they all do it jointly on a bridge linking the past to the future. The former gives a clear sense of departure and the latter a sense of destination, without which one is lost and on holiday from history.

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This observation applies to all civitates, East or West. No wonder individuals, groups, and societies that are either busy conquering or on holiday from history lack such historical consciousness or a sense of conscience about the fate of the future generations. They are not agents who cherish various forms of capital but crude mercenaries of their chosen merchandise, possessed in a shortsighted way by zeal and passion. The most tragic contemporary examples for me came to pass in 2001, when the Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar (1960–2013) ordered the bombing and destruction of the Buddhas of Bamiyan. These are the great statues of the Buddha erected between 507 and 554, even before the birth of the Prophet of Islam. Imagine: Muslims have lived with them for more than half a millennium, considered them capital and a possible source of inspiration, yet ironically the leader of a group that calls itself “students” (Taliban) is so blinded by a mercantilist attitude toward Islam that it feels threatened by them. Humanity has displayed this dual approach to creativity that is appreciation or monopoly while expressing its passion, creativity, and sense of elevation before and it would do so again in the future because these feelings stem from its very makeup. In other words, there are certain elements in the human species that generate these impetuses and impulses. Where they are generated in humanity is the question I turn to next.

Apparatus: Heart, Mind, Soul The occasion or the moment of civility is an intelligible occurrence. It transpires when one senses and experiences with the totality of one’s being and not just with one faculty. I propose that we are composites, consisting of not one but three selves. The Irish-born writer Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) has wittily written, “To be really medieval, one should have no body, to be really modern, one should have no soul” (2007: 151). Taking this statement at face value, in each instance, one needs a mind to figure out how to be. Given this, I think we should edit this maxim as follows: “to perform human, whether according to the medieval world view or the modern one, it is suicidal not to care and cater the body, the mind, and the soul.” My reasoning is that humanity is biological and natural (body/heart), intellectual and cerebral (brain/mind), and psychometaphysical and ethereal (spirit/soul), all at the same time. Humans reflect themselves in the emotional, the empirical, and the spiritual realms, corresponding for me to the working of the heart, the mind, and the soul.

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These constitute three powerful drives in any human and contribute to human appetitive, spirituous, and virtuous demands. To experience the world with the heart alone would be to miss both the scientific wonders of the mind and the awe of the soul at the mysteries of being. To do so with mind alone is to mean that life loses its emotional and spiritual warmth. To detach oneself from the world for the sake of divine experience alone goes contrary to the very order of things in being human. I already introduced the three selves in the introduction—the inciting, the rebuking, and the tranquilizing—that reside in each human being. Here, I like to reminisce about one of the oldest epics in human history, namely the Mesopotamian epic Gilgamesh, to shed some light on this concept. The text depicts the story of a hero called Gilgamesh who is portrayed as being two-thirds divine and one-third human. He ruled the city of Uruk in ancient Mesopotamia. He proved an intolerable tyrant who violated all boundaries: “Heavenly Father, Gilgamesh—noble as he is, splendid as he is—has exceeded all bounds” (2004: 73). In response to his tyranny and oppression, the people called upon the gods to “create a new hero,” and then “let them balance each other perfectly, so that Uruk would have peace” (ibid.: 74). The gods responded by creating another being as strong as Gilgamesh, called Enkidu. But while Gilgamesh was more divine than human, Enkidu was more animal than human. When they faced one another, they wrestled for days without either defeating the other. Realizing each other’s strength, they recognized the wisdom of abandoning animosity and thus became friends. They joined forces and the long poem narrates their adventures together. The relevance of the epic to my story is that the union between the two presented a turning point, creating a new balanced force that proved to be equally animal, human, and divine combined. As a result of this union and the working of the three forces together, the city becomes civilized, exhibited through its gardens, beauty, order, dynamism, and life. The epic ends with Gilgamesh inviting a certain Urshanabi to observe the beauty and the greatness of Uruk, “its mighty foundations… the palm trees, the gardens, the orchards, the glorious place and temples, the shops and marketplaces, the houses, the public squares” (ibid.: 199). For me, the portrait in this passage depicts the “comprehensive, concurrent, and convivial forces” that resulted in the development of the city of Uruk. We can see here the main mechanisms of civilization making. I employ images of the heart, the mind, and the soul as pointing to

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these three dimensions: the animal, the human, and the divine, to represent the three faculties comprising any human being. In fact, the heart (passion and spirit), the mind (intellect and reason), and the soul (verve and vivacity) comprise the epitome of a human being. To perform human means displaying the working of these three dimensions in concert. The sensation and indulgence of the heart for satisfaction, the observation and articulation of the mind for meaning and achievement, as well as the aspiration and imagination of the soul for experiencing the rapture of feeling alive and a sense of elevation, while working in concert, lead to the production and construction of civility and civilization. It will occur when humans engage individually with the world on their own terms. I have already alluded to the new scientific findings about the functioning of the human brain and its various parts and once again emphasize the fact that this is different from the Cartesian rational agency and is in line with the finding of cognitive science that emphasizes the working of a “frame narrative, and metaphor” as shaping human action and behavior (Lakoff and Ide 2005). The experiences of civility and civilization occur as a result of robust and dynamic functioning of the devotion of the heart, the consciousness of the mind, and the awakening of the soul. The heart responds to stimuli mechanisms of the senses; the mind reacts to the drives for the understanding of how things work; and the soul harmonizes human interaction and engagement with others and the world. The interplay of the three in synergy works in a cross-referencing way, to make possible the concomitant, comprehensive, and convivial production. One may ask whether the organic and interactive way is a natural process or like civilization production itself is nurtured and incurred. No doubt, there may be some people who are born with sound common sense, but to have a critical mass of people doing the right thing at the right time requires conscious and deliberate efforts. How should one study this tripartite being consisting of heart, mind, and soul? There is an enduring cliché about the wisdoms of the East and of the West. It suggests that the wisdom of the East focuses on the soul, so the study of the soul is its master science, while the wisdom of the West focuses on the mind, and so study of the political and the ways of forming human institutions is its master science. If we consider ancient Greece as the hinge, the juncture, and the axis between East and West, we might say that these wisdoms found their most elegant and eloquent voices in ancient Athens, in the persona of Plato and Aristotle and the Sophists, respectively. At the heart of Plato’s system of thought lies the soul and its

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ordering, while at the heart of Aristotle’s philosophy is the city and the ordering of human life in it. And for the Sophist, catering to the passion of the material aspects of being human has priority and relevance. It is no surprise that the ideal city for Plato comprises of good and orderly souls, whereas for Aristotle the ideal city is defined by good rules. Plato looked for spirited souls and Aristotle for sober and thoughtful agents. Aristotle makes it clear that one may be a good person but not a good citizen, and vice versa. Aristotle emphasizes how the development of the mind contributes to the quality of human life. I think both Plato and Aristotle have a point because one needs both kinds of wisdom; all actual examples of human civilization demonstrate that both types of wisdom are necessary not only for the good of the community but also for the capacity to understand it. Human dynamism can only exist where there are solid, self-conscious souls and solid mechanisms and structures within which they can operate. Modernity ushered in a new wisdom emphasizing solid, independent institutions that temper, modify, and keep in check the desires of the heart, to facilitate smooth and coherent interaction among wise and spirited citizens. Modern philosophers, especially the English philosophers Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) and John Locke (1632–1704), advocated for these frameworks under the rubric of the “social contract.” This delineates the matrix, the texture, and the framework for any forms of interaction. At the global level, the social contract has taken the form of the international system of states; at the national level, it has become the constitutional state; at the regional level, it is provinces or states; at the local level, we call it the city, district, county, and so on; and at the individual level, we call it the autonomous self. At every level, these structures uphold and guard the parameters of expectations, articulate orderly conduct, and make possible predictability. Any given civilized context both satisfies these expectations and in turn nurture and attracts people who consent to those expectations. Thus, in studying any given civilization, attention will be paid to the wisdom of the heart, that of the mind, and that of the soul in combination. Is there a framework or boundary that orchestrates these activities? I think there is, and that it is an accepted moral framework. It is to this idea that I turn next.

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Ethics: Consequential (Utility), Deontological (Contract), Virtuous (the Good) The heart, the mind, and the soul wonder constructively within some form of limit or boundary. The potential of human desire, imagination, and longing knows no limit and can extend to destruction and inhumanity. The need for limits becomes all the more necessary given that this enormous potential encounters other human beings of similar potential. Aristotle’s insight is forever true in that “anyone who by his nature and not by ill-luck” decides to live outside human association “is either too bad or too good, either subhuman or superhuman” (The Politics: 1253a). I even take it one step further in that human beings are relational creatures in three senses. They pursue their lives in relation to at least three forms of interlocutors: their own self, other souls, and the order of existence as a whole. As an example, note the imbalance in one dimension, i.e., climate change. This phenomenon is targeting humanity’s well-being because of imbalances inflicted on the ecosystem and biosphere by which we have neglected, ignored, or outright violated the order of existence as a whole. Recognizing this imposes the responsibility to create some form of moral framework, which requires constant observation, evaluation, and re-examination at every step of the way. This is exactly what German sociologist Max Weber (1864–1920) means when he distinguishes between two orientations in applying ethics: “ultimate ends and responsibility.” As he writes, “conduct can be oriented to an ‘ethic of ultimate ends’ or to an ‘ethic of responsibility’” (1958: 120). What is this responsibility for? Weber invites us to question our motives and be clear about why we do what we do. We cannot ignore how one’s intentions may manifest in reality. Those who focus on the ethics of ultimate ends only tend to forget the fact that evil can result even when it is not intended. Instead of relying on purity of intention, one has to evaluate whether one’s implementation of good intentions passes the test of the limits that we call the “moral framework.” I propose another triumvirate here that reveals the dimensions of the moral framework: those of the personal, the communal, and the general/universal. The personal applies to respecting the demands of the self (the desires of the heart), the communal or those boundaries that social life imposes on humanity (the aspiration and responses of the human calculation with its mind), and finally the universal, relating

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to the limits that the whole of existence levy on humanity (related to the longing of the soul for serenity). The violation of the personal has immediate consequence, that of the communal will compromise the social order, and violation of the universal will shake the cosmological balance. À la Bentham, I call the first consequential, the second, à la, Kant I call deontological, and third, à la Aristotle, virtuous ethics. Others may have labeled them differently, conveying the same distinctions. I will unpack all three further. The consequential framework, which has the motive of utility, is prevalent and more immediate. It sets the standards for our material existence, the area I identify with the notion of quantity. It works based on laws of cause and effect, with humanity being both the agent of initiation and the final arbiter of choosing between what is pleasurable over what is painful. The British moral and legal philosopher Jeremy Bentham (1748– 1832) and the British economist, philosopher, and Bentham devotee John Stewart Mill (1806–1873) are credited with elaborating and popularizing this framework. I shall refer to their work in presenting the content of utilitarian moral framework. Bentham states categorically in his treatise An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation that “nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure. It is for them alone to point out what we ought to do, as well as to determine what we shall do” (1970: I: 1). In his account, the standard of utility dictates both what must and shall be for the individual and for the public at large, including decisions of the government as the representative of the public. Any action that produces more pleasure than pain is the right course of action to take, and moreover, this should be the “principle which approves or disapproves of every action whatsoever” (ibid.: 2). The highest principle of morality, whether personal or public, therefore relates to the maximization of pleasure and happiness over pain and suffering. The main reason for this rule’s universality is that it “is capable of being consistently pursued” (ibid., II: 10). It is also comprehensive in that utility will apply to all major human spheres: the physical, the political, the moral, and even the religious because it is “capable of giving a binding force to any law or rule of conduct” (ibid., III: 2). Of course, Bentham is wise enough to know that not all human feelings can be measured, so he introduces the principles of “the internal sentiments of approbation and disapprobation” (ibid., II: 11–13) and “the principle of sympathy and antipathy” (ibid.: 2). Even these, however, have the same effect of either augmenting

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or diminishing happiness. By way of summary, for Bentham, utility is both descriptive and prescriptive; it explains, and it dictates. Therefore, he assigns utility its imperative power. As he puts it, if the balance happens to be “on the side of pleasure, will give the general good tendency of the act, with respect to the total number or community of individuals concerned; if on the side of pain, the general evil tendency” (ibid., IV: 6, emphasis in the original). Later, John Stuart Mill tried to humanize this rather dry and stringent principle, without abandoning its main framework. He endorsed the general principle that utility as a natural philosophy is rooted in the human tendency to seek pleasure and avoid pain. He reiterated that the principle of utility “holds that actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness. By happiness is intended pleasure and the absence of pain; by unhappiness, pain, and the privation of pleasure” (1957: 10). Unlike his mentor, Mill postulates that there are higher and lower benefits, and the principle of utility is valid when applied to the higher benefit. Satisfaction of higher needs is a worthy goal for human beings. As he writes: “It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied” (ibid.: 14). What distinguishes humans from other beings is that humans can know both positions. As he continues: “And if the fool, or the pig, is of a different opinion, it is because they only know their own side of the question. The other party to the comparison knows both sides ” (ibid., emphasis added). What is the criterion for distinguishing between the two? Mill relies on human common sense. This is how he expresses his position: “Of two pleasures, if there be one to which all or almost all who have experience of both give a decided preference, irrespective of any feeling of moral obligation to prefer it, that is the more desirable pleasure” (ibid.: 12). Similar to Bentham, Mill allows for the utilitarian principle to be the ultimate arbiter in all cases of moral judgment, including one’s belief in God. In his defense of utility against those who “summarily stigmatize it as immoral doctrine by giving it the name of Expediency” (ibid.: 29), he argues two points. The first is that religious commands are in absolute harmony with the principle of utility and the second is that even the sanction of the divine commands is also subject to human choice; it is the believer who validates both God and the commands. The ultimate sanction for any system of morality is “a subjective feeling in our own minds…. The sanction, so far as it is disinterested, is always in the mind itself” (ibid.: 37).

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To summarize, the utilitarian moral framework considers the self as the sole judge of what is true and worthy of pursuit. The outside world is real, but only insofar as it serves human desires and whim. One does not need to look for any intrinsic value in it. Further, even if one assumes intrinsic value in the objective world, it would be irrelevant unless and until human beings declared it valuable. The world simply offers raw materials, waiting to be appropriated and assigned their value and function. Utilitarianism is useful, powerful, and desirable only insofar as it helps civitates to satisfy the inciting self. The traditional Aristotelian designation of economia for activities that manage human desire was extremely accurate and insightful. Economia covered the activities that one had to do to satisfy one’s survival and daily needs. Beyond this, however, one requires a different kind of moral framework. Some look for the alternative in the deontological ethics that manifest in each civilized context as “contract,” “constitution,” and “charter.” These manifestations usually require the kind of solid foundation that German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) called “categorical morality.” For the Kantian and categorical moralist, in any given situation, there is an intrinsic “right” position and it is the duty of the agent to discover and live by it. How does one grasp the meaning of categorical morality? Kant authored his magnum opus The Critique of Pure Reason to show how both traditional and utilitarian approaches to reason and moral framework were insufficient. Instead of following the forefathers of an established tradition on the one hand, or the commands of usefulness and a cost–benefit formula on the other hand, Kant invites humanity to go beyond the world of quantity and to question things. This requires following the universal principles of morality that have always been part of existence. He does not claim to introduce something new, because he thinks that would be presumptuous. He is simply reminding humanity of the quality in our very being. As he writes: “Skepticism is a resting place for human reason, which can reflect upon its dogmatic peregrination and make a survey of the region in which it finds itself in order to be able to choose its path in the future with greater certainty, but it is not a dwelling place for permanent residence” (1998: 654). It requires conscious effort for human beings to exercise this skepticism, thus Kant’s emphasis on human autonomy and agency. But not just any volition is worthy of being a human quality. He distinguishes between just any will and the worthy one, which he calls the “goodwill.” By good, he means possessed of intrinsic value that is good in itself: “We have, then, to develop the

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concept of a will which is ‘to be esteemed good in itself without regard for anything else’” (1997: 12). What does the good mean? Kant considers something good when and if it is done out of duty and not inclination or reaction to the demands of tradition or worldly need. To be reactive is to give in to the whim of outside sources. In the case of categorical morality, human beings are neither an author of “the good” nor do they act as a tool of discovering it, but instead one takes ownership of an a priori truth that permeates one’s being as well as the entire cosmos. It is in this sense that “every rational being exists as an end in himself and not merely as a means to be arbitrarily used by this or that will” (ibid.: 45). The goodwill is, thus, the one that is done proactively and is done because it is the right thing to do. How does one know the difference? The goodwill is a duty-bound act that complies with moral laws that are congruent with “categorical imperatives.” Kant’s autonomous agent knows the bounds of utilitarianism, contractual as well as universal. He acts within those bounds and in a sense acts within what Kant calls the “realm of ends” where all moral categories are observed (ibid.: 50). The realm of ends has dignity, while other realms have a measurable value that “can be replaced by something else” (ibid.: 51). This distinction is very telling. When one’s decision can be disputed or quantified, then it is not based on the categorical framework and thus is not made for “the right reason.” When an act does not face dispute and is unquantifiable, then one has done the right thing and has acted within the boundaries of the categorical moral framework. The categorical moral framework begins with the assumption that humans are its discoverers and even to an extent its authors, provided their design does not contradict the structure and the constitution of the cosmos. Humanity acts as a discoverer and to a limited degree an inventor, but only insofar as it makes new things by combining natural materials and turning them into novel items. For our discussion here, American legal philosopher John Rawls’s (1921–2002) understanding of truth and justice, which he terms “fairness,” is very helpful in understanding the place of categorical ethics. He uses two paradoxical positions to clarify his theory. The first he calls “the original position” and the second “the veil of ignorance”—two notions first introduced by the economist John C. Harsanyi (1920–2000) in his 1955 essay “Cardinal Welfare, Individualistic Ethics, and Interpersonal Comparison of Utility,” and which Rawls expanded. For Rawls, the original position is a hypothetical condition, comparable to the “state of nature” in the theories of Hobbes and Locke.

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Rawls uses this as a starting point for his analysis. He invites us to accept that “the parties in the original position are equal” (1999 Section 4: 17). Further, “no one should be advantaged or disadvantaged by natural fortune or social circumstances” when it comes to the condition of “the choice of principles” (ibid.: 15). What about the fact that these distinctions are part of human existence and cannot be wished or washed away? Rawls’s position is that “the natural distribution is neither just nor unjust; nor is it unfair that persons are born into society at some particular position. These are simply natural facts. What is just and unjust is the way institutions deal with these facts” (ibid., Section 17: 87). It is an invitation to see the natural inequality as facts and value them as such but refrain from assigning any judgmental position. I remember with candidate Barak Hussein Obama speaking to a television talk show host who asked him “but sir, you are a black man.” His answer is wholeheartedly Rawlsian as follows: “Of course I am, but that ‘fact’ does not define me.” Later, we will deal with the distinction between “equality” and equality before the law (what Arendt calls “isonomy.” The natural distribution also has another important utility, in that such a position offers a “fair procedure so that any principle agreed to will be just” (ibid., Section 24: 118). The operational dimension of this is provided for by his other concept, namely “the veil of ignorance.” The original position works well when it operates behind the veil of ignorance, i.e., a condition where “the parties do not know certain kind of particular facts. First, no one knows his place in society, his class position or social status, nor does he know his fortune in the distribution of natural assets and abilities, his intelligence, strength and the like. Nor, again, does anyone know his conception of the good” (ibid.). They agree to ignore those distinctions to make it possible for justice as fairness to work. It is the working together of the two notions of the natural distribution and the veil of ignorance that leads to the emergence of justice as fairness. For Rawls, the human moral category is basically political rather than either utilitarian or metaphysical. Meanwhile, the individual is an autonomous agent, but he proposes an embedded notion of autonomy rather than absolute autonomy. Thus, he is secular without being utilitarian in his conception of moral framework. As he writes in Political Liberalism: “Transcendent idealism and other such metaphysical doctrines play no role in their organization and exposition” (2005: 100). The last phrase refers to justice and fairness. Again, this is very important and useful: As with the consequential moral framework, communal and

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contractual standards of morality help only in some areas, mostly those requiring human imaginative investigation and observation. Human lifeworld extends to areas that go far beyond either usefulness or practicality, however. Some existential experiences that defy utility or workability, and humanity confront a priori truths whose validity does not depend on human desire or decision. Of course, utility and speculation play their respective roles in facilitating these experiences, but they do not suffice in and of themselves. When it comes to spheres that defy the useful or the contractual, these two categories prove not very effective; hence, the categorical moral framework is based on truth as it is hidden within each one of us. What makes possible the experiencing of this category is that the spheres it covers are innate within all and every human being. Once again, we desire by our heart, imagine by our mind, but then building on those sensory occurrences, we experience a sense of being with our soul. Experiencing this serenity occurs because of some sort of enlightenment, awakening, initiation, and witnessing. This explains why prophets and sages alike invite humanity to envisage and discern such conversion. Plato invited humanity to turn from the confusion of the cave to make a turn toward the light. The irony is that even the unenlightened souls cannot help experience guilt for violating the boundaries of categorical morality. Both consequential and categorical elements are important insofar as the first helps the heart to navigate properly and the second helps the mind to reach some degree of certainty. The soul, however, requires a third form of ethics: virtue ethics. A priori principles of utility or abstract principles are either one-dimensional or unrealistic, Aristotle would say. I put it differently: They are too “experimental” for humanity, which consists of “experiential” beings. The distinction is significant in that experimental agency requires the medium of utilitarian (here, through experiment) and positive rationality (here, through abstract reasoning) to arrive at a conclusion, while experiential agency requires direct engagement. In the words of the Persian poet Sohrab Sepehri (1928–1980), it requires one to “swim endlessly in the lake of the ‘now’.” Aristotle begins his work The Nicomachean Ethics as follows: “every art and every inquiry, and similarly every action and pursuit, is thought to aim at some good” (1094a). Taking Sepehri and Aristotle together, we can see three variables at work: agency, the good, and the now, with the now containing within it both past and present. Thus, a virtuous act is that which is proper, which means that it is good in any given time and place and in the eye of

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a specific agent such as “me.” What happens when the heart, the mind, and the soul have made a proper choice and for the right reason? I answer this question next.

Hallmarks: Conviviality, Allure, Balance What are the attractions of civilization? How does one recognize civility? What are its indicators? What makes a context civilized? I argue that for a triumvirate of characteristics that define civil society: conviviality, tolerance, and balance. I parse the three concepts below. I have already introduced the notion of conviviality as part of the general definition for civitas as concomitant, comprehensive, and convivial production of values and reminded the reader of the etymological root of convivial in the Latin verb v¯ıvere, meaning to live. It is about being alive, dynamic, vibrant, and emanating brightness. To make clearer my meaning, I recall the controversial essay entitled “The Clash of Civilizations,” later enlarged in a book with the same title (1998), by the late political scientist Samuel Huntington (1927–2008). In both pieces, he claimed that the clash of civilizations has characterized public life. I have even heard him in person make the assertion that this idea should serve as a “paradigm” for understanding human interaction, including in the globalized world of the new millennium. This could not be farther from the truth because the phrase “the clash of civilizations” is a contradiction. I believe that he confused civilizations with empires, dominions, and powerhouses: These are solely interested in maximizing their interests, whether inspired by commerce, politics, religion, or ethnic solidarity, and function within categorical, imperious, and clear and certain categories, thus declaring any forms of dialogue and interaction polluting. They are ambitious, exclusivist, and restricted and thus do not engage, converse, and exchange, but rather they command, impose, and dictate. They build barriers and walls because empires and imperial minds clash and are jealous of their possessions and what they consider to be their parameters. They assume special status for themselves and consider others either as competitors or as enemies. Empires and imperial minds strive for homogeneity and consider any trace of heterogeneity as a threat. Commercial, political, or religious powerhouses are not interested in providing space for presence and performing human; they are too busy advancing narrow interests.

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Civitates by their very nature do not concentrate on conquest, even though they are also engaged in the production, distribution, and balancing of power, insofar as the keeping of security and order dictates (Morgenthau 1978). They are too busy “making a life” worth narrating to focus on conquest. If they happened to be in competition, it would be with their own potentials, whether acting individually or collectively, all people focus on their own ideals and measuring their means for realizing those ideals. In their interactions, they must engage in dialogue, fecundate, and learn from one another; they build bridges to do so, while those individuals, collectives, or communities that are imperium build walls to protect their own powers and keep their perceived enemies out. It is those bridges that bring with them diversity and heterogeneity, qualities that in turn yield the spontaneity and geniality that make civitates both possible and attractive to the outside world. The second feature of a civitas relates to how appealing and inviting it is to outsiders. As mentioned before, civitates can easily be recognized at any historical epoch by the direction of migration. What do people, capital, and investment consider to be “the land of opportunity?” From time immemorial, capital, expertise, and the people who possess both have answered this question with their deeds. They voted with their feet before they could speak the language of civitates or enter a ballot box. This has been so clear to me whenever I have visited the site of a civilized context, whether contemporary or its historical remains. Take, for example, Andalusia in Southern Spain, the site of the civilization of the Moors. While there, I resided in Malaga, which was occupied by Muslims until 1487 and was the chief port of the Emirate of Granada. Then, at the peak of the Moorish civilization, it was the destination of the people of means, knowledge, and craft, and today in the twentyfirst century, it is once again a destination for people of means, seeking either a place of residence or entertainment. What was amazing is that my landlords did not even speak the language of the locals but were more than happy to invest their capital and energy in today’s Spain. The main reason is that nowadays, the “West,” broadly defined, is the land of civility; hence, it is a desired destination. It is not at all surprising that from the four corners of the world, people spend money, exert efforts, risk their livelihood, and on occasion even risk their very lives for the hope of getting to the “West.” The direction was not always westward. In the ninth century, all roads led to Baghdad, Cairo, or Cordoba, when these cities were the cradles of knowledge, imagination, and toleration. Indeed,

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the keyword for the enormous allure of the West today and Baghdad, Cairo, and Cordoba, then, was nothing but openness, hospitality, tolerance, and acceptance. The latter means one is filled with hope that one can be and become what one’s potential dictates or what one desires to be, without fear of objection, question, ridicule, harm, exclusion, or persecution. The case known as “the Syrian refugee crisis,” caused by the Syrian Civil War (which began in 2011 and continues to the time of writing in 2020, with no end in sight), illustrates this point. More than six million people are displaced and reside in refugee camps in neighboring countries. Even though these camps are located in the Muslim world, scattered in Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, and Turkey, almost all refugees are attracted to, interested in, and focused on migrating to “the West,” the epicenter of civitas in the world today. Finally, there is moderation and balance. The third overarching hallmark of a civitas relates to a sense of balance that dominates it and guides all aspects of life. Balancing between the bodily needs (worldly existence), human wants (life of creativity), and spiritual/moral aspirations (sacred experience) is not a luxurious enterprise but constitutes necessary and sufficient conditions of civility and civitas. I will deal with the most sensitive area for the balance, i.e., the boundary between the secular and the sacred. I have avoided the word “religion” intentionally because this word is commonly associated with a sense of divinity and God. I contend that the two realms of “the sacred and the secular” may or may not have a metaphysical ontology and root, but always exist in any human society. One may have a sense of sacredness aside from or even despite any concern with God or divinity. For example, Buddhism, which can count as its adherents about 10% of the current world population (as of 2020), does not concern itself with metaphysical questions. Here is how the founder explained it: “[Whether] the cosmos is eternal is undeclared by me… And why are they undeclared by me? Because they are not connected with the goal, are not fundamental to the holy life. They do not lead to disenchantment, dispassion, cessation, calming, direct knowledge, self-awakening, Unbinding” (cited in Noss 1956: “Buddhism”). Yet no one can deny the enormous presence of the sacred in a Buddhist person, a Buddhist gathering, or the Buddhist tradition at large. Anecdotally, when I visited a sacred place honoring “Buddha’s tooth,” it was as though I had been transposed into a holy shrine in the Muslim World, such was the similarity.

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As to the relation between the sacred and the secular, I offer the following general observations: No society can afford to separate the sacred from the secular ontologically and at the same time no society can mix the institutions that deal with the sacred with those that deal with the secular. Simply put, morality and politics are ontologically linked because humanity is interested in both the physical and the metaphysical. To be secular and to have a hunger for a sense of sacred are both strong human tendencies. The Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor (b. 1931) rightly claims that all human orders, present or past, are moral orders (2007). At the same time, institutions charged with moral injunctions should not be mixed or confused with institutions charged with political and administrative affairs; there is a clear division of labor that should not be confused. I suggest that we have here an oval-shaped balance: a two-centered existence where the lack of either morality or politics leads to instability or even the destruction of the whole. This is extremely important because insisting in a circular or one centered existence amounts to imposition of the rules of “all with me,” that makes either a dogmatic context or an empire, while civility and civitates require the rules of “altogether.” For this reason, the triumvirate of concomitant, comprehensive, and convivial production of all spheres of life in concert would lead to a balanced context. It results in order and justice (politics), prosperity and fairness (economy), imagination and originality (science, art, and technology), family and community (society), and memory and edifice (heritage). In addition to giving significance to the past in the context of the present, in a way, monuments legitimate, socialize, and even glorify existing order and authority. Here, the emphasis is on the themes of “concomitant, comprehensive and convivial.” It is comprehensive in that all human aspects are covered; the production takes place at the same time in concert, and it is produced in a dynamic and friendly way. I turn next to an examination of the factors that contribute to such a production.

Pillars: Presence, Ethos, Theater (PET) Which are the main factors making a civitas possible? In another context and in my other work entitled Globalization on Trial, I took the position that civitates occur when human beings manage to bring together “a world vision with a historical system” in order to create a new space to perform human (2000: 52–53). In hindsight, I feel there are two problems with that summary. First, I feel I attached too much importance to

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the engineering dimension of civilization production. Indeed, it sounded as though civility and civilization are a project to manage, whereas human development, particularly “making a life,” is complex and organic, with engineering only as one dimension; civitates may result from a process that comes about as a result of a complex interaction of factors. I use the notion of “may” because a healthy dose of fortune has played an enormous role in the past and will continue to do so in the future. Not every world vision has been translated and turned into a civilized context. Take the example of some contemporary ideological systems such as Nazism, Fascism, and Maoism. They offered a world vision, and even attempted the creation of a world system, but that was not enough. All three ended as temporary powerhouses. Second, in Globalization on Trial, I did not elaborate on, and indeed omitted, any discussion of the mechanisms at work in the interaction between the historical system and a given human vision. I hope to rectify both issues here. Every time a new civitas occurs, it is a new creation, but in a paradoxical way it is also a reenactment of former civitates. In other words, it is a creation insofar as the future is concerned but it repeats the past insofar as it relies on previous human experiences and achievements. There is a saying about the nature of religiosity, which accurately applies to civility and civilizations as well: “Invent your own religion or it means nothing to you; follow the religion of your parent or you lose it.” Similarly, civitates must be invented; otherwise, they do not make sense or do not enrich us. But also, they must be embedded in the great values of the past; otherwise, they alienate us. Which human qualities would be needed for performing such a task? Who could preserve individuality, without taking it to the extreme form of individualism? At the same time, the emergence of civitas demands imagination and ingenuity, to establish a framework that is solid, has deep roots, and is constructive in responding to immediate conditions. Individuality and imagination require a third dimension, namely institution; it appears that all human-organized activities, from war to civitas, require numbers, cohesion, and organization. The union of these three is a necessary condition. When a critical mass of more than fifty percent of the population, who agree on a set of values, direct their energy to creating sophisticated organization, much is accomplished, with the result that humanity achieves both material success and a non-material sense of worth. Now, when this success manifests itself in the form of a mind-set (a term I consider to be more nuanced than “vision”) shared by influential individuals, the result is first, a set of mechanisms that shape

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an ethos that the citizenry embraces and implements, and second, institutions that taken together secure a public arena or a “theater,” within which civility and civilization arise. Thus, a meeting place of individuality, imagination, and institution—manifesting as “presence, ethos, and theatre”—forms the paragon of any given civitas. Once again, we see the necessity for the three dimensions of the heart, the mind, and the soul, to work as a dialectic, or better yet, in concert with each other. The working in concert is not free from tension, however. Indeed, without a constructive tension among the three, no balanced and harmonious working will be possible. This tension results in a sophisticated process of actualization that is evolving and does not remain unchanged. As Toynbee puts it, “Civilization is a movement and not a condition, a voyage and not a harbor” (cited in Tehranian 2004: 82). The voyage provides occasions of human wonder and awe. Beauty, both natural and artificial, invokes this wonder; there is a difference between the two, however. We should distinguish between the web of a spider, which inspires awe because of its beauty and complexity, yet it is a natural phenomenon produced by instinct, and human constructs such as a civitas, a wonder that is produced artificially: While human nature may have some role in it, it is not natural, but artificial and cultural. The next three chapters will elaborate on the deliberate triumvirate of presence, ethos, and theater as an artificial construct called civilization. Because as Bell puts it, “So long as a man remains natural and follows instinct, he will not go far towards civilization. Civilization comes of reflection and education. Civilization is artificial” (Bell 1928: 62). But before delving into the three concepts in detail, I will provide an introductory treatment. By presence, I mean the conscious and deliberate manifestation of human potential, abilities, skills, and daring in community of others. Presence occurs when all human potential can emerge. I hope to identify the various aspects of this potential. In his work Discourse on Method (1637), the French philosopher René Descartes (1596–1650) points to one enormous aspect of potential as Je pense donc je suis, meaning the expression of human mind and reason. At the same time, by becoming the foundation of the philosophical thinking of modernity, this concept has led more to misunderstanding than to revelation of potential. No doubt, the uniqueness of human beings inheres in their ability to think, but we do not live on earth due to or because of contemplation alone. I make the claim that the thinking subject is inadequate because “ergo,” “I,” or agency represents a composite, and not just the intellectual dimension of being human.

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The dominance of Descartes’s “subject” is all the more tragic because reason came to be understood as rationality or “reckoning with consequences,” as it has become fashionable and dominant following the views of the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679). To consider human essence as rationality omits other major components of a complete human being, as will become clear later. To avoid this misunderstanding, I have employed the notion of “presence” to convey human’s display of all needs, wants, potential, resolutions, senses, achievements, and aspirations. The details of these will come in Chapter 2. While “presence” refers to the propensities of individual humans, “ethos” refers to the habits of mind of those humans in their interactions with one another as well as in their relations with the space or the “theater” that they call home. The nuanced aspects of presence may seem to overlap with some of the intricacies of the ethos. For me, however, they are distinct and should be treated separately. For example, “self-worth” refers to a propensity in an individual that arises from one’s awareness through contemplation in solitude. A sense of “respecting others” relates to habits of mind that require practice, repetition, socialization, institutionalized instruction, and punitive procedures. Avoiding abusive behavior, discriminatory practices, and cultivating even simple positive habits of mind such as observing traffic regulations requires serious education, habituation, and socialization. It is not surprising that even in the big urban centers of the most civilized context today, traffic violations and domestic abuse constitute the most common and the most recurring forms of incivility. Finally, by “theater” I mean the physical, structural, and institutional spaces that make it possible for individuals and the collective to gather and experience meaningful interaction. The theater refers to a place where presence and ethos are materialized. Others refer to this space as the public square, the marketplace, and more commonly as the public sphere, but I prefer “theater” because it conveys a sense of dynamism and anticipation for the proactive appearance of performance and action. By providing a secure, open, empowering, and encouraging space, a civilization allows for all potential to bloom and even allows for faith to become stronger by permitting its followers to regulate and manage their relations with the divine and with one another in their own time and manner. This explains the currency of tolerance in all civil conditions, old or new, traditional, or modern. In short, it takes one person to generate presence and two people to agree on a set of rules, while there is a need for three or

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more people to create a public space. These pillars create the conditions and occasions in which human beings experience creativity, serenity, satisfaction, meaning, and awe at being alive. The acronym PET is fortuitous because the word “pet” as both noun and verb denote domestication, caressing, cherishing, and indulgence. Civilizations display an enormous degree of all of these. The greatest enemy of the PET is complacency and indifference, ignorance, and neglect of the rules of the game, and prejudices and systemic injustice. The link among the three PET elements is organic and basic. None can survive individually and independent of the others. Individual agency manifests as “rights” but rights do not function unless they are expressed according to just rules of the game. Meanwhile, the rules of the game will not advance individual rights unless the societal structure guarantees the rights of all. John Rawls captures this sophisticated relationship in the following passage: “Each person possesses an inviolability founded on justice that even the welfare of society cannot override. Therefore, in a just society, the rights secured by justice are not subject to political bargaining or to the calculus of social interests” (1999: 3–4). I propose the various components of a circle—the most complete and simple form, according to the Greeks—as a graphic way of explaining the PET. What I call here “presence” may be taken as the center of the circle, “ethos” as the circumference, and “theater” as the radii. The ethos or circumference offers the parameter or standard that must be followed; presence offers some core pole and the radii point to various institutional ways and forms that civilizations have manifested themselves throughout history. Citizens should be robust enough to act as the pillar because they must resolve to act civil, but they should be aware that they are bound by the rules of the game. One should neither ignore nor violate these rules, since the castle of civilization is precarious and requires gentleness and care. But at any given time and place, the point of connection between the center and the circumference can change, and this is the beauty of it. The way one chooses to connect oneself to the circumference varies based on time and place, and the point of the circumference that one chooses to connect oneself with is optional, subject to one’s predilection and volition. Compare this to flora and fauna, whose limits and standards are set by instinct. By contrast, humans are bestowed with the gift of choosing a set of ethical standards to observe. If the circle works in balance, the interactions among the three major components reinforce, accentuate, shape, modify, and redefine the nuances they need to work and be productive.

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There is versatility here too: The point of circumference that one chooses to connect could be secular, non-secular, or agnostic, making it applicable to historical epochs of the past, present, and future. ∗ ∗ ∗ I hope the combination of the above triumviri offers a general portrait of that moment I have called civitas, where civilization production takes place. It is also where the art of performing human becomes possible. The following table depicts civitas and its working visually. As a reminder, I repeat that presence, ethos, and theater serve as the paragons of making civitas working possible, and so I have devoted the following three chapters to them, respectively. Portrait of a civitas at work Categories

The Good Impulses Passions Apparatus Ethics Hallmarks Pillars

Spheres Natural (body/ heart)

Cerebral (brain/mind)

Ethereal (spirit/soul)

Satisfaction Freedom Enthusiasm Heart Consequential (utility) Conviviality Presence

Achievement Reason Appreciation Mind Deontological (contract) Allure Ethos

Serenity Love Generosity Soul Virtuous (good) Balance Theater

Sources Cited Bell, Clive. 1928. Civilization; an Essay. London: Chatto and Windus. Bentham, Jeremy. 1970. An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation. Edited by J. H. Burns and H. L. A. Hart. London: Athlone Press. First published 1789. Datta, Dhirendra Mohan. 1967. “Some Philosophical Aspects of Indian Political, Legal and Economic Thought.” In The Indian Mind; Essentials of Indian Philosophy and Culture, 267–298. Honolulu: East-West Press. Gilgamesh: A New English Version. 2004. Steve Mitchell. New York: Free Press. Gray, John. 2000. Two Faces of Liberalism. New York: The New Press. Hopkins, Thomas J. 1971. The Hindu Religious Tradition. Encino California: Dickenson Publishing Company Inc.

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Ibn Khaldun. 1958. The Muqaddimah; An Introduction to History. Vol. 3, Translated from the Arabic by Franz Rosenthal. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Kant, Immanuel. 1997. Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals and What Is Enlightenment ? Translated with Introduction by Lewis White Beck, 2nd ed. revised. Upper Saddle River: Prentice Hall INC. ———. 1998. Critique of Pure Reason. Translated and Edited by Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood. Cambridge: The Cambridge University Press. Lakoff, Robin T., and Sachiko Ide, eds. 2005. Broadening the Horizon of Linguistic Politeness. Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing. McIntyre, Alasdair. 1981. After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory. London: Bristol Classical Press. Menocal, Maria Rosa. 2002. The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews, and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain. New York: Little, Brown. Mill, John Stuart. 1957. Utilitarianism. Edited by Oskar Piest. Indianapolis: The Bobbes-Memorial Company, INC. First published 1881. Morgenthau, Hans J. 1978. Politics Among Nation; Struggle for Power and Peace. Revised by Kenneth W. Thompson. New York: McGraw-Hill. Niebuhr, Reinhold. 1943. The Nature and Destiny of Man: A Christian Interpretation. London: Nisbet. Noss, John. B. 1956. Man’s Religions. Rev. ed. New York: The Macmillan Company. Otto, Rudolf. 1950. The Idea of the Holy: An Inquiry into the Non-rational Factor in the Idea of the Divine and Its Relation to the Rational. Translated by John W. Harvey. Oxford: The Oxford University Press. Rajaee, Farhang. 1398/2019. Andishe va Andishevarzi (Thought and Thinking). Tehran: Nashr-e Farhang-e Javid. ———. 2000. Globalization on Trial; The Human Condition and the Information Civilization. Sterling VA: Kumarian Press and Ottawa: IDRC. Rawls, John. 1999. A Theory of Justice: Revised Edition. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. ———. 2005. Political Liberalism: Expanded Edition. New York: Columbia University Press. Schweitzer, Albert. 1987. The Philosophy of Civilization. Translated by C. T. Campion. New York: Prometheus Books in Cooperation with The Albert Schweitzer Fellowship. Strabo. 1960. Geography of Strabo. 5 vols. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Taylor, Charles. 2007. A Secular Age. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Tehranian, Majid. 2004. “Civilization, a Path to Peace,” Globalizations 1 (1) (September): 82–101.

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The Conference Board of Canada. 2018, April 5. “The Value of Volunteering in Canada,” A Report Presented to “Volunteer Canada”, 16. Voegelin, Eric. 1968. Science, Politics and Gnosticism. Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing Inc. Weber, Max. 1958. From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology. Translated, Edited and with an Introduction by F. H. Greth and C. Wright Mills. New York: Oxford University Press. Wilde, Oscar. 2007. Epigrams of Oscar Wilde. Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions.

PART I

A Theory of Presence (PET) and Civitas

CHAPTER 2

Presence and Personhood

I have come to take you to your [true self] even if tugging your ear – To un-heart and un-self you, so as to get you to [your] heart near. Rumi (Sonnet 322: 1)

All beautiful, remarkable, and striking scenes, persons, monuments, great institutions, natural wonders, and occurrences have one thing in common. They shine, they project, and they stand out, and, so to speak, make their presence known. They leave lasting impressions on one’s very being, penetrating one’s heart, mind, and soul. They offer the observer such a vital experience that one is removed from the bounds of spatiality and temporality. One forgets where one is and forgets what time of day or night it is. Facing an amazing and beautiful work of art, one may gaze for minutes and even hours without sensing time and place. This may include gazing at a simple drawing of a child, socializing with a caring neighbor, participating in a simple family gathering, all the way to experiencing a masterpiece of art, having a conversation with a historical personality, or participating in an epical socio-political occurrence. These amazing rushes of fine and energizing feeling transpire because human beings are sensual, rational, and spiritual all at once, and so these sensations are generated

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by heart, mind, and soul. To appear and to make a presence forms the essence of being. No other species needs this appearance as much human beings do, because it offers meaning to their being. The irony is that humans being do need to have presence themselves, but more so, we need others with presence. It is when one encounters someone with gravitas, presence, and a strong sense of self-worth, that the most intense rushes of fine and energizing feelings transpire. Human presences are both the electricity and the lamp that display and shine that energy, which in turn form a life worth of narration, and even to be alive. In Arendt’s words: “To be alive means to live in a world that preceded one’s own arrival and will survive one’s own departure. On this level of sheer being alive, appearance and disappearance, as they follow upon each other, are the primordial events, which as such mark out time, the time span between birth and death” (1971: 20). It is in this sense that Aristotle considered the human being zoon politicon, a creature whose being makes sense among and in the presence of others, and if one encounters a person who chooses to live alone, that person is either above or below the human state. In his word: “man is by nature a political animal, and a man that is by nature and not merely by fortune citiless is either low in the scale of humanity or above it” (The Politics: 1253a). Those who are above humans are gods and those below humans are trapped within “the metabolism of nature,” to use Marx’s words. As human beings in Arendt’s sense, we are not “godlike creatures thrown into the world to look after it or enjoy it and be entertained by it” but instead we are active actors capable “of appearing and disappearing” (1971: 22); lucky are those who are aware of this fact. No wonder one encounters people of presence daily and in unexpected places. They come from all occupations, lifestyles, and social strata. One meets them within the family, in the neighborhood, at schools, at places of work, and these days more often at the national and international stages through the media too. I have been lucky to encounter many of them. As examples, I share with you three encounters that have left a lasting impression on me. The first was my illiterate mother who came from a remote village. Unfortunately, I went to the city to school so did not have close contact with her when I was growing up, but always felt her presence when I finally gained sight with the eyes of the heart, the mind, and the soul. Following her passing, I realized in her an amazing sense of self-worth combined with an enormous sense of modesty. I remember myself and heard from others too, how she would walk and talk with a

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dignified yet modest demeanor that was obviously conscious in intent. She had a strong appreciation for everything, every moment, and every person, regardless of class, conviction, or social status. She reminded one of St. Paul in Philippians when describing himself as the one who knows “the secret of being content in any and every situation, whether well fed or hungry, whether living in plenty or in want” (4:12). She always had a serene face, spoke very little but when she did it was with conviction, and paid attention to everything and everyone. She gently advised the younger generation to walk “like a cow with grace, majesty, and seemliness.” The second example is one of the janitors in my high school in Iran. He was a tiny fellow with a giant heart and a great amount of dignity and self-esteem. He had an amicable and welcoming posture; he spoke softly and had a velvety laugh, yet he also possessed an authoritative personality that commanded respect. At the same time, all students felt he was a person one could turn to in moments of either despair or elation. While these two were familiar to me throughout childhood, my final example is a person I met only once, when I was a graduate student. This was the fourteenth Dalai Lama, whom I encountered in a gathering in Charlottesville, Virginia, in the 1980s. I was sitting close enough to him to observe him directly and carefully. The session lasted for more than three hours, and I am not sure I recall or can claim to have understood any of the things that were said, but I was fixated by the aura of his presence. I still remember vividly the brightness of his face, his body language, his laugh, and most of all his open heart, mind, and soul. All three of these individuals share the same features. The most obvious was “joyfulness”1 that reflected in their delightful and smiling faces almost all the time. They appeared to be ordinary human beings, and yet extremely spectacular. In fact, they all possessed qualities that are paradoxical in that they appear contradictory; generous/parsimonious, optimist/realist, idealist/pragmatist, passionate/aloof, cheerful/sober, caring/restraint, and accommodating/defiant. The list could go on.

1 I have chosen deliberately the term “joyfulness,” as distinct from “happiness.” As their

etymology shows, the first is inward and the second outward. The root of the second means “fortune,” that is, external success. Interestingly, Persian mysticism emphasizes the internal–external distinction. The person of presence does not rely on external successes to be happy. We might expect that experiencing atrocities and exile should make the Dalai Lama unhappy, but in fact, he is both happy and joyful.

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My conclusion from these three examples is that people with presence are solid and one can rely on them in moments of trial and tribulation. I think their heart, mind, and soul are in their respective right places while working in harmony and in concert. These people made me avoid easy notions and overused categories such as person, individual, character even identity because they appear to offer unitary feature, where the aforementioned people displayed multiplicity as well as time and place bound humane performing and playing human. They had multiple layers and yet each were unique in their own ways, but in the form of acting unit rather than being a category. Indeed, each human being acts uniquely but all of us are composed of multiple layers. In the words of the French historian Fernand Braudel (1902–1985): “Man can never be reduced to one personality who fits into an acceptable simplification; though many people have pursued this false hope” (1981: I: 562). However, these personalities or the qualities we call humane are not the attributes one is born with as a species, but rather are the virtues that must be initiated, cultivated, maintained, polished, and imparted to posterity. Now, are these three people who have made such an impression on me examples of civilized persons? I maintain they are. Inside any civilized person, the same faculties—that is the heart, the mind, and the soul— are at work, and when the three dimensions function in concert, it is the same as when individual members of an orchestra perform their roles. For example, when presented with a beautiful bouquet of roses, one’s heart should and will react by pounding with happiness; this sends impulses to the nerve system to make one react with soft thought, followed by graceful behavior. When faced with misery, one’s compassionate soul invokes the nerve system to assume an appropriate response, which then guides ethical action. When we are trapped in situations that challenge us in practical ways, the mind calculates the most utilitarian solution and directs the heart and the soul to endure the pain and to be patient. We perceive these kinds of experiences as valuable and so we seek to repeat them; conversely, to be deprived of opportunities to experience heart, mind, and soul working in concert to respond to our world makes us feel we are not fulfilling our potential. To put it another way, a civilized person possesses a sense of value, but that value is not purely utilitarian, and hence she “will value art and thought and knowledge for their own sakes, not for their possible utility” (Bell 1928: 91). While this sense of value makes appreciation possible, at the same time, it engenders a sense of value for the possessor in other respects too. In other words, those

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who appreciate values, project, glow, illuminate, and manifest those same values. I call this presence and claim that all civitates offer possibility for people to shine and be the best they can be. At the same time, it takes a deliberate effort to generate this. It demands hard work. My grandmother used to say the human throat is a pipe with seven knots and when we want to say something, we must make sure each word is evaluated at each knot before we can be certain about letting it out. She was advising absolute and constant self-vigilance. I maintain that this vigilance related to being mindful of the triumviri explained in the following pages. In other words, presence occurs when, equipped with awareness, one conducts oneself with poise and pride. One is proud to be part of an imaginative creation and one is humbled by the product of the same imagination. In the previous chapter, I showed that all human beings possess heart (emotional and subjective drive), mind (calculative and objective diction), and soul (imaginative and qualitative consciousness); these elements offer humanity potential and the capacity to cause, generate, and foster emotion, logic, and harmony. When one caters appropriately to the burning needs of desire, and when the urge of imagination to take flight and the yearning to experience wonder and meaning in the soul rise, then presence becomes likely. The heart, the mind, and the soul are like parachutes; as the famous adage conveys “they do not work unless opened.” Similarly, the heart, the mind, and the soul do not function unless invoked deliberately. The heart must shine and gaze, the mind must reflect and compute, and the soul must fly and experience. For this to occur, one must bring the three faculties into a constellation through awareness of a series of triumviri that I will point to in the following pages. I know that civilized people have an enormous amount of internal conversation, contemplation, meditation, and preparation before they can externally implement and execute their civility. In this, they exemplify what the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor means when he writes: “Civility requires working on yourself, not just leaving things as they are but making them over. It involves a struggle to reshape ourselves” (2004: 38). That is why the person with presence has a “caring” heart, a “cool” head, and a “calm” soul. It is the dynamism of the working of these three qualities (all happening to start with the letter C) that bestows both individuals and communities with opportunities to exercise potential. In crossing the challenging and perilous terrain of life, such a soul displays caution with courage, morality with practicality, inspiration

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with effectiveness, all while being in tune with both internal and external uprightness and decency. Where does this rich display come from? The source, the cause, and the process are nowhere to be found but inside the self, and it is not just the physical but the totality of one’s existence that gives it a sense of spirituality. The father of modern India, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (1869–1948), described in his autobiography the source of his stamina at the beginning of his work: “I should certainly like to narrate my experiments in the spiritual field which are known only to myself, and from which I have derived such power as I possess for working in the political field” (1957: xii). This depiction is much more comprehensive than either agency (i.e., Descartes’s I, or Nietzsche’s will) or rights (i.e., Locke’s basic rights) and or participation (i.e., the self of the liberal or communal versions in the ideas of Rawls, Taylor, and Will Kymlicka). Here, I take the spiritual field to mean spheres that require one to work on one’s internal strength to perform human. I do not suggest that agency is not important but emphasizing agency does not suffice. One aspect of these spheres includes a sense of agency with awareness and consciousness of the self. For this reason, I begin with my understand of agency first.

Agency: Absorbed, Abandoned, Aware In his book Blindness (1997), the Nobel laureate Portuguese author José Saramago (1922–2010) portrays a city where sudden blindness strikes many people, disrupting civil life and civility. The book begins with the moment when blindness hits a man waiting in his car at a traffic light. Before the light turns green, the driver realizes he cannot see and from then on anyone who meets him is afflicted with the same condition. The result is disorganization and incivility. After a long and detailed description of what happens to the people who go blind, the work captures the moment when people finally regain their sight. The city is still there but when one of the protagonists looks down on the city from the window, she sees “The streets are littered with trash and excrement” (ibid.: Chapter 13). The conclusion one draws is that magnificent structures, sophisticated organizations, and nuanced societal and administrative rules of the game have fallen apart as a result of blindness. It seems that they had functioned well only when citizens operated with open eyes and had clear resolutions to observe. The demand to observe, to be aware, and to have presence in the public sphere, however, begins with the most

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private phenomenon possible. It begins with an invitation to actualize one’s potential to the best of one’s aptitude and potency. And since each human being is unique, it is a demand to foster that special uniqueness. The insightful observation of Rabbi Meshulam Zusya (1718–1800) of Anipoli may offer an opening for the discussion here: “In the world to come I shall not be asked ‘why were you not Moses?’ I should be asked ‘Why were you not Zusya’” (cited in Loader 1997: 18). Agency demands that we all be who we are; nothing more and nothing less. How does one achieve that state of open eyes and how does one fulfill one’s potential unique individuality? The paradox of being a member of the human species, just like anyone else, yet remaining unique, requires self-awareness. This means finding a middle ground between the opposite poles of self-neglect and self-absorption. Self-neglect refers to a state of either ignorance about one’s self-worth or deliberately underestimation of that worth due to a lack of confidence. Self-absorption is the other side of the same coin, in that it refers to a condition of either overestimating one’s self-worth or being overtaken by an artificial sense of status and as a result hiding behind pride, conceit, and arrogance. The Beatles conjure up this person in their song “Nowhere Man”: “He’s a real nowhere manSitting in his Nowhere Land; Doesn’t have a point of view- Knows not where he’s going to; He’s as blind as he can be - just sees what he wants to see” (retrieved from the WWW, April 2020). Like the citizens of Saramago’s city, the “nowhere man” is blind. He lives in a world with no resemblance to the real world because he does not have the confidence to face that world. The “nowhere man” has no idea of his own “self,” while being oblivious to that of others as well. Since such a person does not stand for anything, he falls for everything and easily falls victim to what Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard (1813– 1855) calls “the leveling process,” which happens in a society as a result of the “victory of abstraction over the individual” (1962: 52). An insightful Qur’anic narration depicts such a soul as “a man whose being is shared with several quarrelsome masters within, at variance with one another” (39:29). What is missing in such a person, even when he acts selfishly, is the actual value of the self. This omission can be rectified only when he has a sense of self-worth. One way is to be reminded of the beginning of Kant’s famous essay on the Enlightenment, when he invites humanity to dare to use its own reason for “understanding without direction from another” (1997: 83). Here is an invitation to be born, but not a physical birth of becoming physically independent from one’s mother by the

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cutting of the umbilical cord. It is rather the birth of human agency and an independent moral soul. I think the most telling narration of such a birth is depicted in the classic movie The Fiddler on the Roof . The crucial moment comes when the poor modest tailor Motel stands tall before Rep Tevye and presents himself as a good match for Tevye’s oldest daughter. When Tevye objects and says, “You are just a poor tailor,” Motel rises to the occasion and responds by saying “That’s true, but even a poor tailor is entitled to some happiness!” The magical moment has arrived, and the second birth has just occurred. In the subsequent scene, when Motel reports the encounter to his beloved, Tzeitel, he does it by singing a song called “Miracles.” The key idea is this: “The most miraculous one of all is that out of a worthless lump of clay, God has made a man today.” To be mindful of categorical morality and to live by it requires such a miracle. This is easier said than done, and still harder to maintain, but people of presence do it every day. First and foremost, it requires the will to acknowledge one’s very existence as worthy of attention and consideration. A self-aware person has a good knowledge of his or her potential and areas of strength, while at the same time remembering the Socratic maxim that an “unexamined life is not worth living.” Here, the significance of the symbolic notion of having eyes in Saramago’s novel becomes clear. As he writes: “… to organize oneself is, in a way, to begin to have eyes” (1997: Chapter 13). Metaphorically speaking, having eyes enables us to exercise vigilance, self-respect, and self-observation. Equipped with self-knowledge, one comes to recognize the areas in need of improvement in one’s thoughts, words, and deeds. Self-aware souls live with and know about personal areas of strength and areas in need of rethinking and improvement. This knowledge makes it possible for one to be at peace with oneself. As Charles Taylor puts it in his now-classic Sources of the Self : “Coming to be at home within the limits of ‘our condition presupposes that we grasp these limits that we learn to draw their contours from within, as it were” (1989: 179). What is significant about the self-aware soul relates to its attentiveness to using what Taylor calls “poietic powers” (ibid.: 197): that is, the power of making and re-making oneself. He calls the notion a neology, but its etymology is the ancient Greek verb of “poieo” meaning “to make.” It is more than material production, including as it does creative, imaginative, and constructive constructing. The aware person can create because such a person is proactive and has self-respect

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without arrogance; ironically, the self-aware person has pride but is not imperious. In the rest of the Qur’anic verse cited above, such a soul inheres in “a person who is exclusively owned by one person” (39:29), i.e., his own self.2 This person has discovered the person that exists within and steadfastly fosters and guards that self. In one of his sonnets (ghazals), Rumi considers his main task as facilitating the search for the inner self. I used the first line of this sonnet to capture the message of the chapter above. Here are some of the relevant lines of the sonnet: I have come to take you to your [true self], even if tugging your ear - to un-heart and un-self you, for reaching to you in [your] heart near. I have come to adorn you in this worldly abode -to exalt you like the lovers’ prayers to the eternal mode. Rose is nothing since the real thing is you, the echo, the command, the “voice-” when true to yourself, then you become you, the true choice. Accept the pain and advance like the hero’s brash- give your ear to none but the bowstring, so I may throw you in rash. From earthly stage to being human, there are so many phases -I have taken you from stage to stage, I will do not, block your gases. Say nothing, no excitement or flare up - simmer well with patience for maturity to fly up. Aren’t you born a lion, hidden in the skin of deer -I will thoroughly free you, from that veil my dear? (Diwan-e Shams, Sonnet 322)

Discovering the self is a challenging task. The greatest risk is excessive preoccupation with oneself, to the point of being captivated with or absorbed by one’s personal desires and interests at one extreme and to abandon one’s self altogether at the other. To be self-aware means to respect our being in relation to others. As the American psychologist Daniel Coleman (b. 1946) puts it: “In short, self-absorption in all its forms kills empathy, let alone compassion. When we focus on ourselves, our world contracts as our problems and preoccupations loom large. But when we focus on others, our world expands. Our own problems drift to the periphery of the mind and so seem smaller, and we increase our capacity for connection–or compassionate action” (2006: 54). In other 2 I feel this is closest to the intention of the verse and I owe this rendition to my insightful friend Mr. Amir Mirtaheri, to whom I am grateful.

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words, not all self-knowledge automatically leads to or even contributes to performing human. It contains peril and opportunity, both. Yet acquiring self-knowledge is not dissimilar to losing one’s innocence: once discovered, it cannot be unlearned. While I have enormous hope that the aware agent would have presence and become an active player, I must offer a skeptical and cynical caveat. Sometimes the experience of knowledge may lead to egoism and hubris. If such a person is not tempered with moral categories that allow him or her to negotiate our relations with others, it leads to disaster. Without the moderating influences of moral categories, an aware agent could turn into a hubristic manipulator. The self-aware person is authentic because she has thought about who she is, and what she says or does. Whatever happens to such a person, she approaches it factually and not normatively, i.e., as a factual occurrence and not a bad or a good thing. Even tragedies would be facts that one has to deal with and not a judgment one has to react to. This allows one to be in the driver seat and make decisions; thus, often an aware soul is proactive without being either aggressive or reactive. To clarify the complexities of understanding, consider the act of listening. This might appear to be a simple effort. We are naturally endowed with the faculty of perceiving sound, and thus we may think when we hear something, we really understand it. But I think the following story from the negotiator, public speaker, and author Ed Brodow is insightful: I was having lunch at a bistro in St. Paul de Vence, a picturesque hill town in the south of France. In my fractured French, I tried to order a bottle of beer. “Je voudrais une bouteille de biere, sil vous plait.” I would like a bottle of beer; I told the waitress. “In a can,” she replied. “Non,” said I, “En bouteille!” In a bottle. With her hands on her hips and a sneer on her face, she repeated, “In a can!”. Now I was really getting mad. “Not in a can,” I insisted. “In a bottle. En bouteille. EN BOUTEILLE!” She threw her hands up in despair. “Monsieur, IN A CAN!” “All right,” I said. “Have it your way. Give it to me in a can. Anything. Just give me a beer!”. She stormed off and returned with a bottle of Heineken. Heineken, when you say it in French, loses the “H” and sounds like, “In a can.” I practically fell off my chair, I was laughing so hard. She thought I was nuts. The point of the story is exactly what I stress in my negotiation presentations. We hear mostly what we want to hear, not what the other person

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is trying to communicate to us. (Retrieved from his web page address on July 30, 2019; https://www.brodow.com/Articles/ArtOfListening.htm)

Most of us hear merely what we want to hear, but aware persons listen! As a component of performing human, listening is an art that one must master. What does this involve? One must do it attentively, actively, and objectively. I should parse these three adverbs. Attentive listening occurs when one truly believes that multitasking is impossible. Not only it is rude because it suggests to one’s interlocutors that they do not deserve one’s full attention, but also it is not quite efficient. The writer and information technology expert Nicholas George Carr (b. 1959) who worries about cognitive overload makes the claim in his works The Shallows: What Internet Is Doing to Our Brain (2010) that the human brain is not equipped to multitask. Indeed, the highest praise one hears about a well-known person is that when one is at their presence one has the feeling that one is the most important person to them. Listening actively means one shows interest not just with one’s ears but with other faculties as well. It requires determination and concentration. In ancient Taoism, the human mind is compared to a monkey that is unsettled, restless, capricious, whimsical, fanciful, inconstant, confused, indecisive, and uncontrollable. The most important exercise in meditation is to quiet the “monkey mind,” in order to make concentration possible. Finally, the aware soul listens objectively. One deliberately decides that what one hears are “mere facts” and one defers judgment consciously. To make sure, one asks questions, or one paraphrases, so that if the listening has not taken place as it should have, then the interlocutor has a chance to correct the misunderstanding before venturing to respond. None of this means that one agrees or must agree with what one is hearing, but the point is that in a civitas, lots of listening takes place, because a civitas consists of self-aware agents instead of self-absorbed or self-neglectful ones. Such behavior is preceded by a degree of personhood, which means wearing a special mask, which is to say, performing human. I have the original etymology of the word person in mind here: “a mask of wood or clay that actors wore in ancient theatres.” One must adopt and develop a personality for oneself, and then work hard to maintain it. This comes about through serious contemplation about the meaning of being by oneself, a topic I turn to next.

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Selfhood: Isolation, Loneliness, Solitude How does one develop agency and self-awareness? The American educator, Presbyterian minister, and song-writer Fred McFeely Rogers (1928–2003), whose popular program Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood ran regularly on television for more than three decades, used to repeat the following statement in his show: “You’ve made this day a special day by just your being you. There’s no person in the whole world like you. And I like you just the way you are.” The underlying message here is to look for, find, and take ownership of the “who” one is and then foster its potential and most importantly appreciate it. To that end, I suggest that agency requires self-awareness and having eyes—but what kind of eyes? I maintain, it is the internal eyes of recognizing one’s own potential and one’s own idiosyncratic ways. This in turn requires much more than mere observation; it requires serious practice of spending time with oneself. We know of Moses practicing this in Mount Sinai, Jesus self-isolating by the Sea of Galilee, Mohammad spending endless hours in a cave in Mount Hira outside Mecca, Buddha meditating under the Bodhi tree. For each, the exercise of solitude was a major step in achieving some degree of enlightenment or Nirvana, as it is expressed in Asian religions. To make sense of solitude, I invite the reader to consider a triumvirate that distinguishes among three modes of being separate from other human beings. The first is isolation, where others abandon the person, condemning them to solitude. Sometimes this happens by accident, as when one is cast away on an island or lost in the mountains. Other times, it is deliberate, and tyrannical regimes make good use of isolation. They cannot take away one’s humanity, but they can deprive humanity from sharing a common world with others. In Arendt’s words: “when the most elementary form of human creativity, which is the capacity to add something of one’s own to the common world, is destroyed, isolation becomes altogether unbearable” (1951: 475). In either case, isolation incapacitates one, and so instead of selfhood, self-doubt creeps in and the soul becomes weary. This is the goal when totalitarian societies inflict isolation. But sometimes even mass societies with good intentions cast away the sick, those with idiosyncratic ways, minorities, and in short “others” or those who do not think, act, and live like “us,” and so are categorized as abnormal and dangerous. Totalitarian regimes make people hostage to security and survival, while non-totalitarian societies use the power of persuasion, to the point of sometimes making citizens hostage to greed,

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indirectly imposing on them isolation, without them even being aware of it; this partly explains high level of anxiety and stress in both societies.. The second mode of being separate from others is the sense of loneliness where one inadvertently turns others away by behaving obnoxiously. This form, therefore, can be self-inflicted. In the case of the totalitarian regimes or mass societies that inflict loneliness, loneliness is nurtured within the mind of the societies’ members, so that no one can trust anyone. The condition is insightfully captured in the books Arendt’s The Origin of Totalitarianism (1951), Davie Riesman et al.’s The Lonely Crowd (1950), and Foucault’s Discipline and Punish (1995). It is easy to identify and condemn totalitarian regimes or the capitalist system for turning people, in Foucault’s words, into “docile bodies” (1995: 135– 145). It is much harder to identify and accept “self-imposed immaturity,” to invoke Kant’s notion in his famous essay “What is Enlightenment?” The lonely person indeed lives in a state of self-imposed entanglement either with personal immediate needs and desires, thus blind to the needs and desires of others, or with worldly concerns such as success and social positions and status, thus undermining others in order to succeed. Ironically, in both cases of isolation and loneliness, one lives in constant mistrust and fear of others, to the point that one feels too uncomfortable to deal with other human beings. In societies the world over, the human condition is such that people become strangers from one another, more acutely in some than others. It is reported that the late Mother Teresa (1910–1997) commented that the West suffers from a poverty that is worse that the poverty of Calcutta, that is, the poverty of loneliness, which she termed “the leprosy of the West.” The main problem with isolation and loneliness is that the person who is subject to them remains in a reactive mode (although loneliness is much worse than isolation in this respect). In Arendt’s words: “While isolation concerns only the political realm of life, loneliness concerns human life as a whole” (1951: 475). Both isolation and loneliness put humanity in a defensive mode, cloaked in darkness, whereas the proactive position chases after the light. The proactive soul steps in front of challenges and problems rather than chasing them. This occurs because of the third position that is distinct while yet related to isolation and loneliness, i.e., solitude. Like the previous two modes, solitude also is a state of being separate from others. The difference is that isolation and loneliness owe themselves to “cutting” while solitude results from “carving.” Isolation and loneliness cut all the links in a reactive way, producing a sense of

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removal, elimination, and lessening. Carving creates something that did not exist before, and so solitude invites an internal journey of exploration and imagination, facilitating imaginative creativity. In solitude, one decides to spend time away from others and with oneself. In the Platonic sense, it is the antidote to a condition when “my own single self” will prove “to be out of harmony with and contradict myself” (Georgias: 482). Arendt conveys the same idea as follows: “to be in solitude means to be with one’s self” (1958: 76). Or more explicitly, as she put it: Loneliness is not solitude. Solitude requires being alone whereas loneliness shows itself most sharply in company with others…. In solitude, in other words, I am “by myself,” together with my self, and therefore two-inone, whereas in loneliness I am actually one, deserted by all others. All thinking, strictly speaking, is done in solitude and is a dialogue between me and myself. (1951: 476)

Here not only one is not incapacitated, but rather one enters a serious conversation with oneself about things that matter. I am not referring to separating from others in order to calculate one’s losses or benefits or figuring out the “how” of some sophisticated problem or machinery, but rather it is a state of contemplating vital issues of the human condition. It is to ponder upon “the right things” that go on inside; it is being at peace with one’s senses, agonies, and concerns. The result is clear sight and possibly renewed resolve. As American thinker Kenneth W. Thompson (1921–2013) puts it: “Quiet reflection and intellectual honesty prompt recognition that most of us, at one time or another, experience alternatively quiet desperation or renewed resolve in facing the future” (1979: 110). The significance of solitude is not that it is a place separate from others. That is merely the external metaphor for it. As the Iranian philosopher Shayegan puts it, “solitude is not just a physical space; more than anything else it is a station of inner blooming and the possibility of traversing the inner self” (1378, 1999: 286). To enter the world of solitude means deliberate detachment and volitional withdrawal. It encourages and makes possible what the politician-turned-activist and author of The Leaderless Revolution Crane Ross calls “excavating one’s conviction.” It is an act that, in the words of the American mythologist, writer, and lecturer Joseph Campbell (1904–1987) requires a journey “from the external to the internal world” (1968: 17). The Platonic tradition conceives of it as

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moving from the ordering of the city to the ordering of the soul. As a result, one journeys, in Campbell’s words, from “the veil of the known into the unknown” (ibid.: 82). It is a withdrawal from others for the purpose of a frank and serious conversation with oneself, and then a return to others with assertiveness and resolution. Again, in Platonic wisdom, it is about leaving the cave only to return with an enlightened soul. It contains the three stages of the hero’s journey, in Campbell’s account: Separation, Incubation, and Return. The result would be an epiphany of the highest order. As Charles Taylor puts it, “achieving contact with something, where this contact either fosters and/or itself constitutes a spiritually significant fulfillment of wholesome” (1989: 425). Those who exercise solitude are preoccupied with silence and linger on every occurrence, so that they grasp the inner logic of existential dilemmas. It is insightful that the Qur’an identifies one of Joseph’s attributes as his ability to point out the inner logic of events (Chapter 12: 6 and 21). Solitude turns one from an unaware, unconscious, and unconcerned being into an agent who experiences the pains of the human condition. The great twelfth-century Iranian mystic Farid ad-Din Attar of Neyshabur (1146– 1221) invites us to contemplate the life of all great souls precisely because they have achieved this enlightened state. Such an endeavor, in Attar’s words, turns “the undeveloped being into a man; a man into a lion of a man; a lion of a man into an individual, and an individual into concerned persons who sense the real pains of the humanity” (1386/2008: 8). He invites us to have a serious conversation with ourselves, following the model of those who have had presence. One of the best examples of the exercise of solitude is found in the most significant epic in Indian tradition, the Bhagavad-Gita. At the center of Mahabharata (literally the “great story of Baharat dynasty”), the Bhagavad-Gita captures the conversation between the warrior Arjuna and Krishna, who, on the surface of things, is his charioteer and his council. The text is a conversation between Arjuna and himself about the human condition, through the vehicle of the Hindu tradition and its central figure Krishna. The conversation takes place in the middle of a war between the Pandavas and the Kauravas, who are brothers, cousins, friends, and neighbors. The opening line of the epic story identifies the location of the conversation as “the field of Kuru,” the name of a region. Immediately after, the epic adds that this is also the “field of righteousness” (1986: 21, 1), that is, the occasion to discover the right path.

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The rest of the text outlines a step-by-step path of a serious conversation with oneself. This conversation leads to the right path when one considers every aspect of an issue, including its connection to broader questions of being. The conversation between Arjuna and Krishna covers all aspects of life, from ethics, duty (personal and social), family, death, social order, responsibility, theology, to the relation of the particular to the general. The result of this genuine, deep, and comprehensive conversation is a sense of selfhood, which in turn diminishes ignorance and heightens awareness. As one reads in the fifth teaching of the epic: “When ignorance is destroyed by knowledge of the self, then, like the sun, knowledge illuminates ultimate reality” (ibid.: 59, 16). One gains the knowledge by acquiring powerful divine insight, such as Krishna grants Arjuna: “I will give a divine eye to see the majesty of my discipline” (ibid.: 98, 8). This “divine eye” empowers Arjuna to see things he could not see before, and as he puts it, even restores his reason: “Seeing your gentle human form, Krishna, I recover my own nature, and my reason is restored” (ibid.: 108, 51). The conversation ends with Arjuna declaring how it is clear what he must do. He has won the battle in the field of righteousness, and thus is able to act in the world: “Krishna, my delusion is destroyed, and by your grace I have regained memory; I stand here, my doubt dispelled, ready to act…” (ibid.: 153, 73). Who is Krishna, that he was able to succeed in invoking such enlightenment, awareness, reason, and empowerment in Arjuna? The usual answer is that he is a deity worshipped across many traditions in India, but I take Krishna as the face, the voice, and the embodiment of the immortal, the ultimate, and the universal self and reality. Arjuna, on the other hand, represents the voice, the face, and the embodiment of the mortal, the finite and the particular self and reality, which both reside in every human being. In the Hindu framework, this represents the Atman conversing with the Brahman. The serious and sober conversation, thus, takes place between one and the same person containing the two selves: the particular, and the universal ones. The epic makes it clear that engaging with oneself is a source of strength and serenity, while ignoring oneself amounts to disorder and war. As one reads in the sixth teaching: “The self is the friend of a man who masters himself through the self, but for a man without self-mastery, the self is like an enemy at war” (ibid.: 64, 6). Considering Arjuna wanted to be saved by making the right decision and Krishna wants him to fight, the conversation achieves both. The epic ends with Krishna achieving his goal of making Arjuna rise above personal

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and family interests and prepare to fight his former teachers and relatives, while Arjuna achieves righteousness by making the right decision. For me, the fate of Arjuna captures the value and the virtue of exercising solitude. Citizens who practice solitude tend often to make the right decision. In everyday life one faces many moments of trial and one is constantly tested. For example, when one faces the “ballot box,” it is a field of righteousness, where personal interest confronts the public good. To realize this, one must be conscious of a certain set of values and cultivate the qualities associated with those values. Solitude generates enormous skill and energy for intrapersonal relations. One who has exercised solitude is happy in one’s own skin, has achieved inner peace, and has generated enormous enthusiasm for life with oneself, others, and the world. This enthusiasm relates to a sense of drive, an idea that I turn to next.

Emotion (Love): Longing, Wholeness, Immortality I claimed in the previous chapter that love, reason, and freedom constitute the impetuses for a civilized agency and the production of a civilized context. Now it is time to unpack that claim. Emotion (love) best characterizes the feeling that motivates humanity. The etymology of the word emotion is the Latin verb movere, meaning to move with a sense of strong feeling. In this context, it is synonymous with love and constitutes the most fascinating drive for human action. Of the other two, reason offers the most effective means available to humanity to solve problems, and freedom makes it possible for love and reason to work effectively. I will treat reason in the next section and freedom in the following chapter as part of any given ethos because it is in ethos the working freedom relates to social dynamism more than individual disposition and mental habit. As to love, it is one of those notions that have become so common that its meaning has been cluttered, obscured, and befuddled in contemporary parlance. It has become so overused that it has, in fact, become an unfamiliar concept. For example, in our daily discourses, one loves God, a television show, a piece of pie, and one’s homeland all in the same breath. I hope to revitalize and uncover some of love’s forgotten and now unfamiliar dimensions here. For me, the most significant and unfamiliar aspect of love relates to the senses of vitality, vigor, verve, and vim that should possess one’s very being in its totality. Such a state of being generates a strong sense of longing to be in the present moment and to take an

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active role in the unfolding of history, both personal and public. Note that I say one is possessed by it, rather than experiencing it as an urge to take possession of an object or another human being. How does one grasp this unfamiliar notion of being possessed by love? Originally, I had thought of utilizing another triumvirate, i.e., “Eros, Philia, and Agape,” à la the work of Irish-born British novelist, academic, essayist, literary critic, and theologian Clive Staples Lewis (1898–1963), better known as C. S. Lewis (1960). He considers the manifestation of love as four-part: Affection, Friendship, Eros, and Agape. I feel Affection and Eros have such a close affinity that they could easily be combined to explain the expression of our sentiments, whether toward a natural phenomenon, artefacts, or another human being. They may capture the longing of the heart. Friendship reveals the sense and the good intention of the mind toward others, an idea that I will revisit in chapter four on the working of the “theater.” Finally, Agape reflects the expression of the soul and dominates the totality of being. However, I think the notion of love is too elusive to be captured with this neat categorization. Instead, I will go a different route. To begin with, all civilizations acknowledge the significant role of love. As suggested by the fourteenth-century sage and poet Hafez of Shiraz, those who do not have love are merely the walking dead: “Whomever is not alive with the fire of love in this dwelling- Do perform whose death rituals, based my religious bidding” (Sonnet 244: line 7). In the prolog to his treatise on love Sawanih, the Persian mystic Ahmad Ghazali (d. 1126) explicitly states that “love cannot be expressed in words nor contained in any sentences” (1986: 15), yet he proceeds with a very accurate depiction of it as “an intoxication experienced by the organ of (inner) perception” (ibid.: 65). One’s inner being must be intoxicated and possessed with the wonders of life itself in order to display vigor and vitality. My elaboration on this intoxication begins with the most read, debated, and familiar text in the Western tradition on love, namely the Plato’s Symposium dialogue. For Plato, love is the first god to be created along with the earth after Chaos (178b). Here is how the discussion unfolds. The text narrates Agathon’s drinking party celebrating his play’s victory in a competition in 416 BCE. The interlocutors abandon drinking, partying, and even entertainment for the sake of spending the evening in conversation (176e). They choose to concentrate on love by offering a series of encomia on love. The first speaker, Pausanias, the legal expert of the group, distinguishes between virtuous and vulgar love, admiring the

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former and condemning the latter. As he states, “giving in to your lover for virtue’s sake is honourable, whatever the outcome…. But lovers of the other sort belong all to the other Goddess” (185c). A worthy love is the one between the lover and the beloved for the sake of virtue. For him, love involves the erotic love of possessing the beloved. Next, the physician Eryximachus takes the floor and portrays love as a heavenly catalyst that exists everywhere and animates the elements—hot and cold, wet and dry—in harmony (185c–189b). Here, love is not in need of a beloved, but rather refers to a catalyst. Then the preeminent comic playwright Aristophanes, announces that he takes a different approach from the other two speakers, because for him love is an enormous power. If people grasped it, they would “built the greatest temples and altars” (189c). The root of this power lies, according to him, in a myth that I narrate below because it is insightful and plausible. According to the myth, in the beginning there lived three kinds of “complete” beings: male, female, and a combination of both. “The male kind was originally an offspring of the sun; the female of the earth; and the one that combined both genders were an offspring of the moon” (190b). Being completely free from any need for the gods must have upset them because how could some beings exist while being completely independent of the gods. In order to punish these independent beings, Zeus came up with the idea of crushing their power by cutting them into half and reshaping them into the form of humans as we are today, creatures with mixed and conflicting desires, so that “each of us, then is a ‘matching half’ of a human whole” (191d). The conclusion is that each of these humans lives daily with a powerful desire and longing for the other in order to be complete. Aristophanes then concludes that “now ‘love’ is the name for our pursuit of wholeness, for our desire to be complete” (192e). This is a powerful and plausible portrait that other cultures and traditions echo as well. For example, love as a solution to the anxiety of separation is a theme that one finds in Rumi. He opens his magnum opus with the grievances of the reed about the condition of being separate from its origin: Listen to the reed-flute, how it complains -The story of separation, it explains. Ever since they cut me from the reed field -My wail has moved men and women weeping to bleed.

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I look for a heart that is torn with longing -So that I might share this love and yearning. Whoever has been, parted from their core -to join to the roots, troubles they endure. (Mathnavi I: 1–4)

So far, what seems universal is the notion of love as longing. A man of presence, therefore, would experience longing for union with the beloved, whether personal or even communal. But the discussion in the Platonic dialogue goes further as it moves on to the next speaker Agathon, the host and the poet. He speaks poetically and begins by claiming that the previous speakers praised love as a god but did not talk about the qualities that “enable him to give the benefits for which we praise him” (Symposium: 195a). For Agathon, love has external beauty as well as moral character. For the latter, he uses the Greek notion of arête, which represents the four cardinal virtues in Hellenic tradition, i.e., bravery, moderation, wisdom, and their combination, justice. Following his elaboration of each (196c–197b), he concludes that love “is the most beautiful and the best” (197c), elevates it to the status of a god to be “our best guide and guard” (197e). Moreover, it is the driving force behind all life and orderly existence. “Love fills us with togetherness and drains all of our divisiveness away. Love calls gatherings like these together…. Love moves us to mildness, removes from us wildness” (197d). Unlike the previous speakers, Agathon assigns a more proactive role for love in human affairs and takes it beyond mutual relations. It helps us become part of a bigger whole. Then Socrates takes the stage and, as is his common practice, he questions other speakers’ positions. He agrees with Agathon, however, that “one should first describe who Love is and what he is like and afterwards describe his works” (201d). The method he chooses is to narrate his conversation with a fictional character called Diotima, who could who possessed the power of enlightening. According to Diotima, love is not a god belonging to the realm of immortal, but instead it is a phenomenon “between mortal and immortal” (202d). She adds that “Gods do not mix with men; they mingle and converse with us through spirits instead, whether we are awake or sleep…. These spirits are many and various… and one of them is love” (203a). Socrates asks, “who are his father and mother?” (203b). Diomita relates the following story. On the day Aphrodite (the God of love) was born, there was a big celebration where Poros (way or resource), the son of Metis (cunning), was also present.

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Penia (poverty) also came “as poverty does when there is a party” (203b). Penia found Poros asleep in the Garden of Zeus. In order “to relieve her lack of resources,” she made sure to get pregnant by him. The result was Love, which has his “mother’s always living with Need” and his father’s appetite for “beautiful and the good,” his bravery, and his longing for wisdom (203d). In a way, Love is condemned to a life of being inbetween mortality and immortality, ignorance and wisdom, happiness, and sadness, with an intense desire for the good. Indeed, immortality is the key concept here, which is distinct from the notion of wholeness that Aristophanes talked about earlier. That was about life here on earth, whereas immortality exceeds the limits of human life in the here and now. Hannah Arendt has put it succinctly: “The Greeks’ concern with immortality grew out of their experience of an immortal nature and immortal gods which together surrounded the individual lives of mortal men. Imbedded in a cosmos where everything was immortal, mortality became the hallmark of human existence” (1958: 18). And the Greeks wanted to go beyond it. As Diomita herself puts it, “it is for the sake of immortality that everything shows its zeal, which is Love” (Symposium: 208b). And this spirit resides in all beings, particularly “all human beings and that everyone wants to have good things forever and ever” (205a). When Socrates asks for more clarification, Diomita employs the metaphor of pregnancy to explain the sense of the spirit of love. Love is like being pregnant, provided the birth is done “in beauty” (206e). How does one perform the act of the delivery with care, gentility, refinement, and propriety, and for what purpose? All human beings are born pregnant with the spirit of love, i.e., a strong drive for immortality, beauty, and quality. But some are pregnant for qualities related to the material life and others for non-material ones. As one reads, “some are pregnant in body… while others are pregnant in soul” (208e–209a). The pregnant should gaze at the beauty of everything, including the sensations, desired by the heart, camaraderie and friendship as demanded by the mind, and public empathy and universal solidarity as hankered for by the soul. The hankering of the soul for immortality is because human beings are mortal, as discussed above, yet has the potential of becoming immortal with the power of love that soften them to think, to speak and to do things in a beautiful way. As mortal beings, we long for satisfaction of our mundane desires, including joining with the beloved. We then strive for becoming a whole, which requires serious execution of our mental designs and finally

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accepting the fact that we are “between mortal and immortal” we are “intoxicated and possessed” to reach the aspirations of our soul. Now, when the satisfaction of the heart’s desire and the articulation of mind’s association with others occurs “in beauty” (206b), with the occasion of experiencing elevation of the soul with caring for the highest good, love has manifested itself in its three forms. It is this combination that makes presence a pleasant happening. What helps aggrandize this occurrence in beauty is what I call reasonableness, and I turn next to this.

Logos (Reason): Utilitarian, Demonstrative, Normative Like the notion of love, reason is an overworked concept these days, to the point that it has lost both its precision and familiarity. I have often wondered how the ancients associate the nature of being human with logos, regardless of the discipline, whether philosophy, religion, rhetoric, or psychology, for example, or across religious traditions including Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, or across the cultural milieus of the Chinese, Indians, Persians, Mesopotamian, and Romans. They considered humans inherently capable of reasoning, even though some refused to exercise it. But unlike the moderns who overemphasize how every human being is a “rational animal,” they saw human rationality as one aspect of human existence. When the Anglo-Irish essayist and poet Jonathan Swift (1667–1745) wrote to the English poet Alexander Pope (1688–1744) the following, it was a pointed critique: “I have got materials towards a treatise proving the falsity of that definition animal rationale [a rational animal]; and to show it would only be rationis capax [an animal capable of reasoning]” (September 29, 1725). Rumi expresses a similar sentiment as follows: “The legs of the rationalists, are made of wood- Feeble are indeed, those legs of wood” (Mathnawi I: 2131). What do they mean by it? It is easy to defend this position with the claim that it means rationality alone does not define humanity, but offers it the potential to free itself from unreflective and random behavior and to block impulses; in this sense, humans are by nature reasonable. This is a good response, but it reveals what reason is not; it is the opposite of impulse and natural sensation. Positively, however, one could claim that being reasonable means that humans are the only creatures that can meditate, contemplate, and reflect on what they are doing, and often predict the consequences of their

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own lives on earth through the power of their reason. I think Kant’s short definition captures what I want to convey: “Reason is the power of understanding the connection between the general and the particular” (1900: 71). Capturing the link relates to all realms of human life: material, artistic, aesthetic, ethical, moral, and spiritual. One can meditate on the cost and benefit of a measure, on the unraveling on a complex issue, or the working of a natural and artificial phenomenon, and on the meaning of an existential and qualitative experience. In that sense, reason can produce things that do not exist naturally, even if this creation is not completely ex nihilo. This might include, for example, satisfaction at eating good food, a light moment of happiness, the sense of achievement at producing a work of art, and moments of epiphany as one does the right thing and avoids the wrong. As I have been saying, civilization is most fruitful venue for providing the temporal and special sphere for this comprehensive creation. It makes possible the production of material things, abstract information, theory, and knowledge, as well as sophisticated wisdom. Information refers to bits and pieces of facts and figures about a given phenomenon, event, or person. Knowledge results from an orderly analysis of those facts and figures. When one synthesizes knowledge while considering all pertinent factors, the impact of time and space within the context of universal values, laws, and consideration, one may reach a degree of wisdom. Reasonableness contributes most to this enormous creation. I do not need to catalog the praise of reason in all traditions. It will suffice to note Rumi’s account of reason as “God’s Shadow” (Mathnavi IV: line 2110, “reason is God’s shadow and the God is the sun”). He further attributes to the Prophet the saying that “Whoever is a man of reason is part of our soul” (ibid.: line 1947). The significance of reason is also understood by common sense. Rumi presents an ironic story of a man counseling his enemy, who was known to be a reasonable and a wise person. When the interlocutor questions his motives and explicitly states that he is an enemy and one must be wary about counseling one’s enemy, the answer is insightful. The inquirer acknowledges the animosity but states “since you are a reasonable thus wise man, your wisdom does not permit you to astray to the wrong path” (ibid.: line 1982). As such, as the shadow of God and the guardian of proper behavior, reason will help one always do the right thing. But what precisely do notions of reason, wisdom, and reasonability mean?

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I will stay with Rumi for elaboration on this question as well. I share with the reader his two sets of categorizations of reason. At one level, he divides reason into “partial intellect” (‘aql-e jozwi), and “universal intellect” (‘aql-e kolli), both of which reside within every human being. By its very nature, the partial intellect focuses on matters of the temporal and the earthly (ibid.: lines 3310–3325), and for that reason it relies solely on human cleverness and ingenuity: “The partial intellect cannot discover, thus—cannot but address needs and techniques” (ibid.: line 1294). It is also for this reason that “the partial intellect become victorious at times and fails at others–while the universal intellect is free from ‘the misfortune of time’” (ibid.: III: line 1145; the bracketed phrase is from the Qur’an 52:30). Also, the partial intellect is in a state of constant searching and uncertain wondering, whereas the universal intellect is about serenity and tranquility: “the universal intellect provides a ‘sight that does not swerve’– the partial intellect is looking everywhere” (IV: 1308; the bracketed phrase is from the Qur’an 53:17). At another level, Rumi divides reason into two forms of rationality: one form is acquired through hard work and the other by cultivating inner or God-given belief. As Rumi puts it: “Reason is of two forms, the first the acquiring one—this you will learn through education,” “the second is God given—in that its source is in your soul” (Mathnavi IV: lines 1959 and 1963 respectively). For Rumi, the second form compares to a just ruler “who guards and rules the heart” (ibid.: line 1985). I endorse wholeheartedly Rumi’s second category here and think it is synonymous with the “universal intellect” he talked about before. This is a form of reason that cannot be taught and requires introspection about and reflection on the inner being so that one can grasp a sense of moral right and wrong, and hence I call this form “normative rationality.” Rumi’s category of “acquiring rationality” is synonymous with “partial intellect,” in his first categorization. This pertains to worldly and quantitative issues and spheres. For the purpose of precision, I will divide the latter into two categories of positive and utilitarian rationality. I will say a few words about each. First, I argue that the three forms of rationality that comprise human reason corresponds to the working of the heart, the mind, and the soul in concert. A second point is that reasonableness occurs when there is serious meditation in three areas: cost and benefit analysis by the means of reckoning with consequences in the heart; scientific true-and-false understanding about the complexity of how things work though discovery in the mind; and assessment of right and wrong though experiencing

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a sense of meaningfulness and moral tranquility. When the three work in equipoise, the three forms of rationality will emerge: normative, positive, and utilitarian. Normative or ought, deals with what is appropriate, i.e., relating to standards of acceptable behavior at the personal level and legitimate norms at the societal level. Positive or accurateness is about precision that shows the limits of possibility, efficiency, and practicality. And finally, utility or usefulness deals with maximizing advantages and limiting losses. The heart directs utilitarian rationality since it senses what is desirable and what appears to it as detestable. The mind manipulates positive rationality to ascertain what is true and verifiable and what is false and refutable, while the soul commands normative rationality, pointing to what is morally acceptable and avoidable. The working of these three forms of rationality in concert is not easy. Plato points to this insightfully and beautifully in the metaphor of “the union of a team of winged horses and their charioteer… chariot-driving in our [human] case in inevitably a painfully difficult business” (Phaedrus, 245a–b). In a world dominated by this multifaceted human reason, as I reflected in this image, connection is often intuitive rather than calculating, as assumed in a world where people understand reason as calculation and a reckoning with consequences, as stated by Hobbes. Pure and unquestioned intellectual activities of the mind or positive rationality generates theoretical science—natural, social, and human—practical and operational framework—industry, trade, and production. Oriented by utilitarian rationality, these products focus on optimal gain and benefit to the point of universal commoditization of all aspects of life. At the same time, one must credit these forms of rationality for making life both possible and easy. Positive rationality generates the necessary postulate and the sustenance; utilitarian rationality provides the means and auxiliary tools and amenities to make life easier and more comfortable. The third form, i.e., normative rationality, offers choices to orient life, thus the need for all three. Indeed, the interference and the working of normative rationality moderates and softens the hegemony of efficiency and utility. The propitiation of these three forms of rationality would make possible a practical, worthwhile, and desirable production, distribution, and reproduction of values, each in its proper position. A civilization neither accepts small as insignificant nor great as marvelous; each and everything, all beings, and happenings, are precious in their place and each is significant in the great mystery of civilization’s production. Appropriate production is necessarily balanced because normative rationality orients the production process

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toward an ethical process. Schweitzer observed this almost a century ago, writing that “ethical progress is, then, that which is truly the essence of civilization” (1923: 23). Normative rationality generates the distinction between right and wrong that in turn fosters moral conviction that in turn facilitates willing. Positive rationality generates the distinction between true and false that in turn fosters intellect that in turn facilitates thinking and understanding. Utilitarian rationality gives voice to the sense of pain and gain that in turn encourages desiring or detesting. To act because of and motivated by only one of these forms of rationality may not be wrong, but it is not enough. If the arrow in your quiver is of only one form of these three, there is something missing. Neither, however, should one trivialize any one of them individually; each performs an important function in its proper place. A human act, worthy of the designation reasonable, comprises all three, thus appealing to the sensual affection of the heart, to the empirical reckoning and computation of the mind, as well as to the ethical morality of the soul. An act thus is reasonable when it calms our heart, convinces our mind, and restores our spiritual serenity. Being reasonable in this balanced way helps reduce the foible of selfishness, vanity, and pride. At the same time to have reached this balance generates enormous energy and skill for interpersonal relations. Any interlocutor finds such a person pleasant and easy to deal with. What is it about such a person that is so attractive? This is my next topic.

Spirit: Authenticity, Tenacity, Reverence How can one define the allure of the reasonable person? Is it their attitude, their logos, or their discourse? I think it is all three, but I have opted for attitude in order to capture the present triumvirate. Such persons have attitudes that display authenticity in their heart, tenacity in their mind, and reverence in their soul. They breathe and live the three, even if they are not aware of them. A few words about each are in order. These days, the notion of “authenticity” has acquired a special and technical connotation in existential philosophy, but this is not the meaning I have in mind. I am using it in a more general sense of referring to the state of being true to one’s inner sense, regardless of and despite any outside pressure and challenge. Paying attention to “the inner voice” is important because, in the words of philosopher Charles Taylor, “it tells

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us what the right thing is to do. Being in touch with our moral feelings would matter here, to the end of acting rightly” (2003: 26). I use authenticity in the sense that Taylor has used it, i.e., being true to oneself. I want to share with you the first time I came across this notion, without realizing the significance of it at the time. Many moons ago, when I succeeded in the competitive entrance exam to Tehran University, I had to leave my small town and go the giant capital city. My father wanted me to pay a visit to the absentee landlord of our village, who resided in Tehran. Captured in the leftist intellectual paradigm of the time, I considered the man part of the “exploiting oligarchy.” But I respected my father’s request. It was a good visit and the landlord encouraged me in my studies. At my departure, he gave me a piece of advice that took me a long time to decipher and appreciate. He said: “You have come from the village and have begun a long and fascinating journey. On the way you could fool anyone: your parents, friends, and even God if you believe. I beg you, however, one person you should never fool is you. Do what you like, but always be truthful to your own inner self.” It took me not years but decades to appreciate this, and even so not yet completely. Authenticity means absolute honesty with one’s inner soul, and this is the only thing that one can say with complete and unequivocal certainty. It is in this sense that Rumi notes, “No one but the authentic self is the master of the Reason of reason” (Mathnavi III: line 2527). I can tell you from my journey since entering the university that it is hard to understand this and much harder still to implement it. It requires absolute trust in the inner voice, which is easy at the start but an extremely hard stance to maintain. The demands of the desires of the senses and the heart, as well as the constant inquisitions, questionings, and cynicism of the mind, push one toward uncertainty in one’s soul. A reminder again: having certainty of the soul is not the same as selfish stubbornness of the heart or the pride and arrogance of the mind or an ideology-bound mind. What it means is a humble taking possession of one’s life; one must be in charge. The great Siddhartha Gautama Buddha puts it in terms of conquering the inner force. Here is how this is expressed in the Dhammapada, versus 103- 105: Though one may conquer a thousand times a thousand men in battle, yet he indeed is the noblest victor who conquers himself. Self-conquest is far better than the conquest of others. Not even a god, an angel, Mara or

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Brahman can turn into defeat the victory of a person who is self-subdued and ever restrained in conduct.

A humble and modest soul has little certainty in the heart and the mind but has enormous certainty and trust in the power of his or inner soul. Experiencing this sense of certainty requires the quieting of the passion of the heart and constant inquisition of the mind. I am not suggesting that one should ignore or dismiss their potential, but instead one should learn to use them as great means for developing authenticity, as they are. It is important to note that these forces are not the Master of Human beings; quite to the contrary, human beings are the master of these inner forces. Authenticity of the heart does not work independently; it requires tenacity of the mind. I have chosen the word tenacity deliberately, knowing that it is usually used for measuring the strength of a fiber. For me, it conveys a quality of holding steady and remaining persistent, something that is possible with the aids of the imaginative calculation of the mind. All human achievements of the past or present, from the Taj Mahal in India, the Great Wall of China, the Pyramid of Giza in Egypt, to the modern Christ the Redeemer Statute in Brazil, have come to existence as a result of many years of persistent hard work. In fact, the construction of La Sagrada Familia in Spain began in 1882 and is still ongoing, with 2040 as the projected date of completion. One might say that these examples are cases of physical transformation of a space, but I suggest all activities on the face of earth, including those related to quality, require persistence and tenacity. Think of any scientific development or artwork. The mythology of every case recounts their appearance in terms of flashes of inspiration or genius, but in fact they are the result of repeatable experiences, sustained theorization, and many years of hard work, often tedious to the point of being boring. Only gods can command: “Let there be,” and it will be. Thomas Edison’s famous adage that “genius is one per cent inspiration and 99 per cent perspiration” is insightful and true in all cases. The way he himself interpreted this in a reply to his secretary Samuel Insull is as follows: “Well, about 99 percent of it is a knowledge of the things that will not work. The other one percent may be genius, but the only way that I know to accomplish anything is everlastingly to keep working with patient observation” (cited in Clark 1977: 89). The story of the invention of light bulb, so taken for granted, may illustrate the point. The world credits Thomas Edison (1847–1931) with its invention, but history has recorded the name of Humphry Davy (1778–1829), the

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British chemist and inventor, as making the first electric light in 1809, decades before Edison’s birth. In 1878, another chemist and inventor, Joseph Swan (1828–1914), made an electric light bulb but it lasted only for a little over ten hours. When Edison made the durable bulb in 1879, he confessed that this was the result of hard work, many theories, and experiments. As he wrote, “I speak without exaggeration when I say that I have constructed 3,000 different theories in connection with the electric light, each one of them reasonable and apparently likely to be true. Yet in two cases only did my experiments prove truth of my theory” (cited in ibid.: 90). On another occasion, he confessed how tenacity kept him going: “The electric light has caused me the greatest amount of study and has required the most elaborate experiments. I was never myself discouraged or inclined to be hopeless of success” (cited in Ezekie-White 2010: 21). I feel the saying of the British art critic, painter, social thinker, and philanthropist, John Ruskin (1819–1900) summarizes tenacity best: “I know of no genius but the genius of hard work.” In his book Outliers: The Story of Success (2008), Malcolm Gladwell explains how the great names of history, past and present, achieved what appears to the rest of us as magical and miracles due to hard work. He includes all areas of human endeavor, from science to art, computers, and even the life and world of the prophets. Imagine historical names such as the prophets all the way to the famous people such as Bill Gates (b. 1955), the founder of Microsoft: Gladwell estimates that that their accomplishments are the result of at least 10,000 hours of hard work. He does not underestimate or dismiss opportunity, background, social status, or even place of birth, but in the end the key is tenacity. Bell would have agreed with him: “The civilized man is made not born; he is artificial, he is unnatural. Consciously and deliberately, he forms himself with a view to possessing and enjoying the best and subtlest; and yet in another sense, all sophisticated though he be, he is the least distorted of human beings” Bell (1928: 185–186). Authenticity and tenacity require a quality that I call reverence. When Socrates talked about love he made it conditional upon being “in beauty.” I suggest the same thing here in that presence occurs when authenticity and tenacity are performed with reverence. There is an old story worth narrating here that helps demonstrate this notion. It tells the tale of a traveler in medieval France at a site where stone cutters were at work. “He approached the first worker and asked, ‘What are you doing?’” Bored and angry, he replied: “I am cutting these huge boulders with the simplest

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of tools and putting them together in the way I have been told to do. I’m sweating in this heat and my back is hurting.” The traveler asked the second person the same question. He responded as follows: “I have a wife and children at home, so I come here every morning…. It gets repetitive sometimes, but it helps to feed my family….” The he asked the third worker who responded, with a shining eye while pointing to the heaven, “I’m building a cathedral” (Silf 2003: 40). The Jewish Austrian philosopher Martin Buber (1878–1965) summarized this attitude in his now classic 1923 short book I-Thou. He suggests that one must consider the other, whether it is a thing, a notion, or another being, as having the same potential and power of consciousness as one’s own. The “I-Thou” is different from “I-It.” Note the following passage: I consider a tree. I can look on it as a picture: stiff column in a shock of light, or splash of green shot with the delicate blue silver in the background. I can perceive it as moment: flowering veins on clinging, pressing pith, suck of the roots, breathing of the leaves, ceaseless commerce with earth and air- and the obscure growth itself. I can classify it in a species and study it as a type in its structure and mode of life. I can subdue its actual presence and form so sternly that I recognize it only as an expression of law – of the laws in accordance with a constant opposition of forces is continually adjusted, or of those in accordance with which the component substances mingle and separate. I can dissipate it and perpetuate it in number, in pure numerical relation. In all this the tree remains my object, occupies space and time, and has its nature and constitution. It can, however, also come about, if I have both will and grace, that in considering the tree I become bound up in relation to it. The tree is no longer it. The tree is no impression, no play of my imagination, no value depending on my mood; but it bodied over against me and has to do with me, as I with it…. I encounter no soul or dryad of the tree, but tree itself. (1937: 7–8, emphasis in the original)

One may argue that both the story and Buber convey an attitude and not the meaning of reverence, but I argue that it is precisely the reverence in one’s soul that shapes such an attitude. Going back to the story of the stonecutters, the first worker has no sense of reverence either for

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his own person or for the work done, hence the loathsome uttering. The second at least assigns some sense of utilitarian worth to what he is and what is being done. Only the third follows what Albert Schweitzer calls the “ethics of reverence.” He considers what he does to be of monumental value, thereby elevating both himself and his work. And Buber is inviting us to have reverence for ourselves first, and then to extend this to every phenomenon outside of our own being. According to Schweitzer, following the ethics of reverence marks a life worthy of human beings. In his words: “The ethics of reverence for life put in our hand weapons for fighting false ethics and false ideals, but we have strength to use them only so far as we–each one in his own life–preserve our humanity” (1987: 329). Now, authenticity, tenacity, and reverence suggest the focus of one’s attitude, i.e., toward one’s own person, one’s community, and the totality of being, respectively, an idea that I turn to next.

Commitment: Personal, Collective, General The person of presence contemplates, converses, and conducts himself or herself responsibly, but responsible to whom? First and foremost, to his/her own self, then to the other, and finally to the totality of being. The distinctions among person, community, and totality are very important because what we are may refer to our natural characteristics that only people with extreme divine power can reveal. Or, the responsibility may be to some cultural, ethnic, and historical heritage that one belongs to automatically. Then again, it may refer to our identity as a “species being” to borrow Marx’s phrase, who in turn has borrowed it from Ludwig Feuerbach (1804–1872). The three layers envelope one’s existence, regardless of the level of our awareness. They are with us, but the question to ask is whether we are with them, and if we are, what does this mean? The answer amounts to a declaration of the parameters of thought, speech, and deed in one’s interaction with oneself, the other, and the world. At the same time, a person with a sense of presence is aware that the aforementioned factors in their very being are accidental in relation to the person. The paradox remains that one should take ownership of each to rise above it. The fact that one is even born human at all is an accident, to say nothing of the specifics of being born on a certain date in the calendar, in a specific geographical place, and to parents with a particular culture, religion, and tradition. Why was I born in the middle of

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twentieth century, in the Middle East, and in the Rajaee family, with the religious and ethnic overtones that come with these particulars? It is accidental, nothing more. To adhere to these accidental linkages in an unexamined way is to resign to be satisfied with a status below one’s potential as human; as Socrates puts it “examining myself and others is the greatest good to man, and that the unexamined life is not worth living” (The Apology: 38a). I feel he means examining the life that one conducts with oneself, with members of the immediate community, and with humanity at large. Do not assume that I am advocating abandoning these concerns, but instead I am asking that we have conversations with ourselves to think about what we are doing before actually doing it. This is an invitation to live consciously: it is not that we should necessarily abandon the parameters we are born within, but that if we choose to live within them, we should do it after conscious examination and deliberation. This relies upon the notion of “solitude” that I talked about before. The practice of solitude encourages and fosters a second birth that is separate and different from the physical birth from the womb. It is when the “who” within us is born. Even though the actual birth takes palace in solitude, the life of the “who” does not occur in vacuum. First there is the newborn self that must live with and face the person who has been there until the time of re-birth, with desires, wants, and agonies in every moment. If we dare to take ownership of those elements and meditate on them, we can arrive at our “self-understanding,” to deploy Charles Taylor’s notion, especially given that “our first self-understanding” usually is “deeply embedded in society” (2004: 64)—and I would add within our family and immediate surroundings. The newly mediated self-understanding brings with it a condition of what Hannah Arendt calls “natality,” that is “the new beginning inherent in birth” (1958: 9), particularly the personal and spiritual birth, distinct from the physical and natural birth from one’s mother, and that is why it is “quite independent of the frailty of human nature” (ibid.: 191). Then there is the relation of the old and the new self with others who, as recipients of presence, react to them, and so serve as mirror for one’s “social-self-understanding.” Interestingly, the encounter with others has two levels: one relates to the immediate family, the clan, the culture, and, today, the national community, while the other relates to the encounter with humanity at large. These spaces, à la Aristotle, Arendt, and Taylor

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constitute the sphere or the arena that people come to term with in determining not just how to relate to others, but also how even to relate to themselves and to develop a sense of how they see themselves as social players. Of course, each person makes choices and participates in shaping and formulating his or her own social mores, which I talk about in the next chapter. For now, I remind the reader of what Taylor has called the “social imaginary,” which he defines as: the ways people imagine their social existence, how they fit together with others, how things go on between them and their fellows, the expectations that are normally met, and the deeper fellows, the expectations that are normally met, and the deeper normative. (2004: 23)

Not only a given society, but every collective has its own “social imaginary,” which helps the collective function and promotes the interests of its members. The individual has choice in deciding which collective to belong to, and it is a characteristic especially of the secular age, as Taylor outlines in his now-classic A Secular Age (2007), that everything is a choice, including God. Personal understanding helps the person discern their individual desires and wants (individualism), and the social self-understanding or the social imaginary invites “an appreciation of the way human life is designed to produce mutual benefit” (ibid.: 70). Both elements have a utilitarian drive. Responsibility toward the totality of being stems from and existential and moral fact that, in Arendt’s words, “we are not mere earth-bound creatures” (1958:11). At the same time she reminds us that “The earth is the very quintessence of the human condition, and earthly nature, for all we know, may be unique in the universe in providing human beings with a habitat in which they can move and breathe without effort and without artifice” (ibid.: 2). What is important to note is that the personal, the communal, and the universal are descriptive, normative, and prescriptive depictions of the condition of playing human. When they work together, the result is enormous presence, but exclusive concentration on one of these may lead to the undesirable conditions of conquest, of being on holiday from history, or utter destruction. Interestingly, though, the activities that each demand from the player differ, a triumvirate of concerns that I will turn to next.

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Conduct: Labor, Work, Action So far, I have concentrated on the various aspects of the mind-set of a possible agent with presence. The last triumvirate of the chapter entails the activities, behavior, and ways of conducting oneself facing the world. Personal concerns demand enormous labor, the communal requires and demands work, while the universal, helped by the personal and the communal, begs for action. It is true that our physical make-up demands certain activities for survival, but is that all we must do, and to what extent do these activities contribute to presence? Here I would like to consider this by concentrating on human activities. The fact remains that the flora, the fauna, and the human occupy the earth. Whereas the software of the flora and the fauna is a closed system and cannot be self-modified, human software includes the closed software of instinct and material necessity, but it is much more than that, and allows human beings to go beyond instinct and necessity. To explain this claim, I rely on contemporary political philosopher Hannah Arendt and her now-classic work The Human Condition (1958). Arendt humbly confesses that it is impossible to categorically state what humanity is. The latter requires grasping human nature, an indulgence that is beyond human potential for the following reasons. On the one hand, only the Creator can reveal what human nature is, and on the other hand, humanity is not simply a natural being but rather what Arendt calls a “conditioned being” (1958: 9). In the first sense, “the earth is the very quintessence of the human condition” (ibid.: 2) because the earth is the only place humanity can live without artificial facilities and humanity breathes its air, drinks its water, and consumes its natural products. In another sense, everything humanity comes “in contact with turns immediately into a condition” of its existence (ibid.: 9). Arendt thinks one can obtain a good understanding of what humanity is about through focusing on what it does on earth. She distinguishes between three types of activities, a distinction that constitutes the main components of the book. They are labor, work, and action. Labor refers to an activity we have in common with all other creatures. It has links to the biological process of the body, and all creatures possess a bodily mass. It has to do with survival, biology, and necessity. Labor belongs to the biological processes of life and death, production and reproduction, and even human reproduction, in order to make possible the cycle of life that in turns guarantees the very existence of the human organism

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and perpetuation of the species. Labor relates to activities that necessity demands and requires. As such, its products do not last but are absorbed by the processes of birth, metabolism, and eventual decay. It functions within the cycle of production and consumption. Labor is not a onetime activity but something that one has to do repeatedly. For example, eating is one such activity that requires continued finding, acquiring, and production of foodstuff. This activity is associated with necessity and is of limited use beyond sheer necessity. Labor is an activity that can easily be extendable, either replaced by another person or even by a machine. There are functions that slaves could do in the past that robots do at the present. It now makes sense to remember how under cosmo-centric worldviews it was necessary to show that slaves are of lesser human status, whether defined as such by Aristotle or by Augustine. The next activity is work. The first point to note here is that work, unlike labor, is not necessary. There is a degree of volition involved. This activity leads to the production of things for use other than mere consumption or mere satisfaction of bodily needs. It is not an endless cycle, but rather it has a beginning and an end. Whereas labor is the most natural activity, in some ways, work is unnatural. Many products of work result from the destruction of nature. For instance, we make chairs and tables by cutting down trees, an activity that is not strictly necessary, but that does make life easier and more pleasant. As Arendt notes, “Work provides an ‘artificial’ world of things, distinctly different from all-natural surroundings” (ibid.: 7). Humanity creates this artificial world because it facilitates a useful environment that houses our individual lives. We should also register that both labor and work are inherently personal, private, and individual activities, even if sometimes done in collaboration with others. Work and labor both occur when people alone in their kitchen or workshops or other places and moments of loneliness engage in them, even though collectives will use their products. Not only humans but also some other creatures engage in the activity of work. Think of the works of birds when making their home, or the chipmunk busily at work in front of my home. As a cultural category, work possesses the potential both for one to take it over and manipulate it, paving the way for action, or to be taken over by it, and in the words of observers such as Marx, to be alienated, or in the words of Weber, to fall in its golden cage. The latter happens when we are not conscious and vigilant. The third activity is action, which is not as visible as the other two, but more important, more complex,

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and of much higher significance. The first point to note is that action is neither necessary nor useful. Life does not end without it, and it does not produce some utility, yet humanity desires it and finds it worthwhile. The second point is that while labor relates to activities common to all creatures by necessity, and work occurs because of individual creativity, action is a paradox. Collectivity provides both the necessary and sufficient conditions for an action to occur it does not happen without and or outside of a collective. In labor, common service to natural necessity submerges individuality. In each creative work, the individual signature is preserved, but the product still surpasses the creator and tells us nothing about its creator other than that the person can produce such an artwork. It is only in action that the person actualizes their very being and experiences vitality and vigor. Action relates to a mental and non-physical birth that makes possible going beyond the criteria of necessity and utility. It is closely connected to what Arendt calls “the human condition of natality” (ibid.: 9). Only humans are capable of such re-birth, and no other creature is capable of such development. This, according to Arendt, is particularly the human condition, in that other creatures, big or small, share with humanity the conditions of labor and work. Labor causes life itself, work lead to facilitation of life, but action makes life worth living. I think pain, frustration, and boredom are life’s greatest inflictions on humanity. They are caused by the three conditions of necessity, utility, and freedom but the three human activities of labor, work, and action provide responses to them. Labor relieves the pain of hunger, thirst, and other physical necessities; work helps reduce some of the frustration one feels from the pressures of life; and action makes sense of the absurdity that one feels in living in a world where one has no definite answer as to where one has come from and where one is going. The occasion of action demands that labor is done and work performed well. One can labor without any heed to work; one can work without any heed to action; it is the product of labor and work that facilitate action. To use the metaphor of the theater, it is the product of labor and work that set the stage, create the proper decoration, costume, light and ambiance for the individual and the group of actors to appear, reveal themselves, and create moments worth remembering and narrating. Human action is sweet as honey and as “bees cannot make honey unless together” (Smith 1991: 105); it will not happen unless with and among others. In a sense, people of presence recognize and prize all three activities, because one gains pleasure from each, and from the union of the

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three that yields the complete expression, execution, and materialization of human potential. Labor provides intense and immediate pleasure, work leads to a more enduring and gradual one, while action causes higher and immortal pleasure. It is the combination of these pleasures that make life worth living and cherishing. At the same time, an actor has vision, courage, and optimism in facing challenges, adversaries, and the unknown. One must be insatiably curious, consider impossibility as challenge, and dare to detach oneself from the coastline of convention, habit, and the familiar, all of which require no conscious thinking or questioning. Such characters go beyond the common position of problem-solving and seize every moment as possible opportunities, to the point of developing a knack for snatching victory out of the jaws of adversity and defeat. In his work On Becoming a Leader, the American scholar, organizational consultant, author Warren Bennis (1925–2014), who is credited with creating “leadership studies,” writes, “it is not enough for a leader to do things right; he must do the right thing” (2009: 30). This is a theme he has often repeated orally and in his other written works. I think one can easily replace the word “leader” with actor and rephrase this statement as follows: laborers do what is necessary. Workers do things we want right, but actors do the right things in right measure. ∗ ∗ ∗ I hope to capture the essence of the present chapter with the following verses, which came to me when I was thinking as to how to end this section: Men of presence, facing the challenges of life- Are always conscious of the proper path in strife. Three faculties, the heart, the mind, and the soul- Give one happiness, serenity, and wisdom for the goal. When one’s conscience is clear, empathic, and bright- Life, efficacy, and fairness will appear in sight.

Furthermore, I would like to end this chapter by stating that the seven elements at work in bringing about presence—agency, selfhood, emotion, logos, spirit, commitment, and conduct—make possible the right dose of reacting, responding, and acting, each in its societal space and temporal occasion. The following table presents a snapshot of the constituent parts: The Portrait of Presence

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Categories

Agency Selfhood Emotion (Love) Logos (Reason) Spirit Commitment Conduct

Spheres Passion (sense/heart)

Intellect (mind)

Spirit (soul)

Absorbed Isolated Longing Utilitarian Authenticity Personal Labor

Abandoned Lonely Wholeness Demonstrative Tenacity Collective Work

Aware Solus Immortality Normative Reverence General Action

As a way of summation, one reacts with one’s emotions to someone else’s ego; one responds to outside instigators and provocations with one’s ego, mind, and logos; and one acts when one rises above the reaction and response with one’s spirit and soul. In fact, presence mostly occurs because of spiritual daring, which frees one from needs and wants. As an outside observer, one notes the right reaction, the proper response, and inspires action, that together make the presence and appearance substantive, solid, and immortal. Indeed, to be a person of presence means to know how one has no choice but to be a leader, a manager, and an administrator, because one must act, work, and labor as time and place demand. People of presence, however, function within the parameters of an accepted framework that I term “ethos,” the topic that I will consider next.

Sources Cited Arendt, Hannah.1951. The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co. ———. 1958. The Human Condition. Chicago: Chicago University Press. ———. 1971. The Life of the Mind. One Volume Edition. NewYork: A Harvest Book. Attar, Farid ad-Din. 1386/2008. Tazkerat-ol Oliya [Life of the Sages]. Edited by Mohammad Estelami. Tehran: Entesharat-e Zarvan, 16th printing. The Bhagavad-Gita: Krishna’s Counsel in Time of War. 1986. Translated and with an Introduction and an Afterward by Barbara Staler Miller. New York: Bantam Books. Bell, Clive. 1928. Civilization; an Essay. London: Chatto and Windus. Bennis, Warren. 2009. On Becoming a Leader, 2nd edn. Philadelphia: Perseus Books Group.

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Braudel, Fernand. 1981. Civilization and Capitalism; 15th to 18th Century. Translated from the French and revised by Sian Reynolds. 3 Vols. London: Willian Collins Sons and Co. Ltd. Buber, Martin. 1937. I and Thou. Translated from the German by Ronald Gregor Smith. Edinburgh: T. and T. Clark. Campbell, Joseph. 1968. The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Carr, Nicholas G. 2010. The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. New York: W. W. Norton. Clark, Ronald. 1977. Edison: The Man Who Made the Future. New York: Bloomsbury Reader. Coleman, Daniel. 2006. White Civility: The Literary Project of English Canada. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Ezekie-White, Christine. 2010. I Think So. Durham, CT: Strategic Book Group. Foucault, Michel. 1995. Discipline and Punih; The Birth of Prison. Translated from the French by Alan Sheridan, Translation copyright 1977. New York: Vantage Books. Gandhi, Mahatma. 1957. An Autobiography; The Story of My Experiment with Truth. Boston: Beacon Press. Ghazzali, Ahmad. 1986. Sawanih: Inspirations from the World of Pure Spirit. Translated from the Persian with commentary and Notes, Nasrollah Pourjavady. London KPI Limited. Gladwell, Malcolm. 2008. Outliers: The Story of Success. New York: Little, Brown. Kant, Immanuel. 1900. Kant on Education (Ueber Padagogik). Translated by Annette Churton. Boston: D. C. Heath, and Co., Publishers. ———. 1997. Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals and What Is Enlightenment ? 2nd ed. revised. Translated with Introduction by Lewis White Beck. Upper Saddle River: Prentice Hall INC. Kierkegaard, Soren A. 1962. The Present Age and of the Difference Between a Genius and an Apostle. Translated by Alexander Dru and Introduction by Walter Kaufmann. New York: Harper & Row. Lewis, Clive Staples. 1960. The Four Loves. London: G. Bles. Loader, David Norman. 1997. The Inner Principal. Washington, DC: The Falmer Press. Saramago, Jose. 1997. Blindness. Translated from Spanish by Giovani Pontiero. Orlando: Harcourt Books. Schweitzer, Albert. 1923. On the Edge of the Primeval Forest. London: Black. ———.1987. The Philosophy of Civilization. Translated by C. T. Campion. New York: Prometheus Books in Cooperation with The Albert Schweitzer Fellowship. Shayegan, Darioush. 1378/1999. Assia dar Barabar-e Gharb (Asia Facing the West). Tehran: Amir Kabir, third printing.

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Silf, Margaret. 2003. One Hundred Wisdom Stories from Around the World. Cleveland, Ohio: The Pilgrim Press. Smith, Huston. 1991. The World’s Religions; Our Great Wisdom Traditions. New York: Harper-Collins Publishers. Taylor, Charles.1989. Sources of the Self . Cambridge: Harvard University Press. ———. 2003. The Ethics of Authenticity. Toronto: Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. 11th printing. ———.2004. Modern Social Imaginaries. Durham: Duke University Press. ———.2007. A Secular Age. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Thompson, Kenneth W. 1979. Ethics, Functionalism and Power in International Politics. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University.

CHAPTER 3

Ethos and Mechanisms

The measured king of the world, measured devotees demands– I suffered to the point of pale face, to fulfill the commands. Rumi (Sonnet 1400: 7).

We must become just by doing just acts, and temperate by doing temperate acts; for if men do just and temperate acts, they are already just and temperate, exactly as, if they do what is in accordance with the laws of grammar and of music, they are grammarians and musicians. Aristotle (NE: 1105a).

While a great virtue, presence only constitutes one of the paragons of performing human, civility, and civilization. It is true that the individual forms the locus of presence, but individuality makes sense only among other human beings, particularly when they genuinely interact.1 1 “Interaction” differs from doing things together, producing worldly values to satisfy needs and wants, even producing great works of science, art, and human progress. Interaction generates mutual empowerment and possibilities for human fulfillment and “self-actualization,” to utilize American psychologist Abraham Maslow’s overworked notion.

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As such, it demands two sets of frameworks. The first, still abstract, relates to societal mental habits, rules of the game, or a set of “social selfunderstanding,” in the words of Charles Taylor (2004: 69). The second, more concrete, refers to a structural framework or a “spiritual space,” in the words of “the Perennialist,” the German-Swiss scholar Titus Burckhardt (1908–1984), in order to facilitate the manifestation of presence in any given historical epoch. Adherence to the rules of the game and the integrity of the given space guarantees the continuation of presence, which in turn encourages civility and civilization production. This combination creates what Taylor calls a “moral order” (2007: 159–171, and 184–185), the animating presence that in turn gives playing human and civilization production external reality. The present chapter concentrates on the features of this moral order or the collective habits of the mind, while the next chapter elaborates on the characteristics of the space and the features and functions of the physical context that offers the arena for the implementation of the habits of the mind. ∗ ∗ ∗ I would like to initiate the conversation on “social self-understanding” with the encounter of the prince and the fox in the well-loved book The Little Prince. The fox rightly tells the prince that for their relationship to solidify and endure, there is a need for some ethos. Here is the episode: The next day the little prince came back. “It would have been better to come back at the same hour,” said the fox. “If, for example, you come at four o’clock in the afternoon, then at three o’clock I shall begin to be happy. I shall feel happier and happier as the hour advances. At four o’clock, I shall already be worrying and jumping about. I shall show you how happy I am! However, if you come at just any time, I shall never know at what hour my heart is to be ready to greet you… One must observe the proper rites…”. “What are rites?” asked the little prince. “Those also are actions too often neglected,” said the fox. “They are what make one day different from other days, one hour from other hours.” (The Little Prince, Chapter 21)

These “rites” that give distinct meaning to our moments and to our collective mental habits, I call “ethos,” a word that has a common root with the word “ethics.” This is an intentional choice, because the accepted

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mental habit not only sets a framework for the manifestation of presence but also functions as a normative boundary. In other words, it is theoretical as it identifies the acceptable; it is functional as it facilitates the interactions between the members of any given society; and it is normative as it sets limits, parameters, and boundaries for those interactions. I think that when Aristotle suggested that man tends by nature to live with others, he meant it in all these meanings. Indeed, he went so far as suggesting that if one “is unable to live in society, or who has no need because he is sufficient for himself, one must be either a beast or a god” (The Politics : 1253a). In a way, such a person is not human at all. He has become either a god or a beast, both of which in our understanding have no need for “others.” It is human who want to be with others who encourage the authentic inner being to appear. To be with others, however, requires a set of accepted mechanisms and rules of the game. The latter defines and regulates boundaries, creates distinctions, defines roles, and lays down the various frameworks that a given society considers and endorses as proprieties, etiquette, decorum, and ethos. In the passage cited underneath the title of this chapter, Aristotle poetically compares it with “the laws of grammar and of music” (NE: 1105a) for the working of the communal life. Ethos makes possible a circular condition in that it sets the boundaries and it regulates and normalizes one’s interaction with oneself and with others. It pertains to three areas. The first aspect covers the area of the particular/personal, attesting to the individual’s behavior. The focus is on the individual and it covers one’s attitude toward oneself and one’s attitudes toward others.2 When Max Weber distinguishes between the ethics of ultimate end vs. ethics of responsibility (1958: 120), he is talking about the personal as well as societal codes of conduct. The difference is that the former often consciously or inadvertently serves as “license” for one to pursue what one perceives as truth without serious meditation, while the latter demonstrates care and “responsibility” in one’s conduct toward

2 Note that the notion of “other” refers to someone other than the self in two senses. One is the other whom I choose to associate with, and I do so because there exists a personal mutual interest. Here, the other means the fellow inner member in a group that I have special attachment. Then, there is “the other” with whom I may not share mutual interests, and yet I cannot ignore them because we live in the same community, or even more broadly, we are both members of the human race. Here, we have the common good between us.

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oneself and the others in the public arena. The border between theoretical dispositions and practical habituation is extremely fine, as I have demonstrated in the previous chapter. The triumviri I have used below will further capture some nuances of this distinction. The second aspect of ethos relates to the semi-official and yet informal domain, i.e., social and collective rules of the game in a given community that require norms that in turn help the smooth and orderly interactions of communal organized human life, together within an accepted consensus and shared cultural mores. This is the realm of social norms, custom, and normalcy. Here, the notion of “anomie” or normlessness, as expounded by the French sociologist Emile Durkheim (1858–1917), comes to mind. “Anomie” refers to the breakdown of this dimension of ethos. Durkheim considers the main cause of suicide (for me the erosion of presence altogether) as the absence of ethos, particularly in this second sense. Meanwhile, the third aspect of ethos pertains to the formal and official relations of people living together at large outside specific communities and within the parameters of a polity at large. Here, ethos covers the legal and political spheres—hence, we may even include credo, law, authority, and the frame of legitimacy. This latter area regulates one’s behavior toward all members of the society, beyond the bound of personal and collective choice, or cultural and linguistic solidarity, either at the national or at the international levels. Scholars debate this aspect under the rubric of the public sphere, the common, or the political in general. While Durkheim focuses on the negative consequences of the lack of normalcy, Charles Taylor focuses on the positive meaning of normalcy and what it means for society. Indeed, he rightly considers all social orders as being moral in way or another, but he calls this the “social imaginary.” His understanding of notion is insightful as well as informative: I adopt the term imaginary (i) because my focus is on the way ordinary people “imagine” their social surroundings and this is often not expressed in theoretical terms, but is carried in images, stories and legends. It is also the case that (ii) theory is often the possession of a small minority, whereas what is interesting in the social imaginary is that it is shared by large groups of people, if not the whole society. Which leads us to a third difference: (iii) the social imaginary is that common understanding that makes possible common practices and a widely shared sense of legitimacy. (2004: 23)

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Ethos combines all these dimensions and in its three expressions deals with human decency and loyalty toward fellow members in a polity as well as in the totality of existence. I have mentioned how ethos is normative in that it affects ethical, legal, and human values and sets codes of conduct that citizens consider valuable to observe, uphold, protect, and even sacrifice their lives for. These three—ethics, normalcy, and legality— shape the given rules of the game in a civilized context. At one level, they create a common frame of reference, a common habit of mind, or a modus operandi that a polity agrees upon, functioning according to its rules. It is mental also because it is an imagined world; moreover, it is a shared imagined world that puts an accent on how that imagined world thinks and acts. In turn, this accent helps players interact, express presence, and make sense of one another’s moves, hues, contents, and gestures. At the same time, spatial and temporal factors influence the shape and the color of the accent. As an example, “The Canadian Union Act of 1840” (Article III) enabled the Canadian parliament “to make laws for Peace, Welfare and Good Government” and this has formed the main pillars of Canadian ethos, but it does not mean that in actuality these principles rule every aspect and in every moment. It does convey, however, that Canadians aspire to live in a society where these principles shape the circumferences and the lines, and that these principles also color the working of its institutions. An individual Canadian strives to live a life in accordance with these qualities and to act in as peaceful and orderly manner as possible. One also expects that the dominant rules of the game and the socio-political system in Canada will aspire to these principles. They are to accent the “presence” that a Canadian and/or Canada displays at the local, national, and global levels. As an illustration of alternative ways of being, consider the following two observations. A non-Western anthropologist commented about the distinct framework of the East and the West as follows: “In the West you have to sell yourself whereas in the East you have to buy yourself.” A Middle-Eastern American professor had this to say about the same idea: “When I travel to the Middle East my mind starves but my heart feasts. When I am in the West my mind feasts, but my heart starves.” Both views talk about different frame of references that are cultural, and within their framework, one could interpret and understand presence. To be aware of the virtues of the rules of the game, however, does not automatically guarantee the right attitude or proper behavior. The next step is to make them habits in the social mind. To use a more contemporary jargon, one should operationalize them. In other words,

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it is by implementing the rules of civility in a sustainable fashion that civilization emerges. And the rules of civility do not take hold unless they become the accepted norms and the modus operandi that in turn forms decorum, a frame of reference, and a set of values for the society that each member feels obliged to observe and follow. It decides the etiquette at all levels in each polity. As the definition of the concept suggests, it makes a “system of rules and conventions that regulate social and professional behavior. In any social unit there are accepted rules of behavior upheld and enforced by the legal codes; there are also norms of behavior mandated by custom and enforced by group pressure. An offender faces no formal trial or sentence for breach of etiquette; the penalty lies in the disapproval of other members of the group” (“Etiquette,” The Britannica 2008 edition). In a sense, this system becomes the abiding quality of a given civilized context; thus, I have utilized the notion of “ethos.” Once again, when we talk about the dominance of a special ethos, we refer to a condition where at least fifty-one percent of the people at fifty-one percent of the time endorse and live within its parameters. Such a degree of observation gradually makes it the dominant paradigm or a game changer, and/or reaches the critical mass of tipping the point toward civilization production. Indeed, the mark of a civilized epoch is that at least the fiftyone percent of the people maintain the accepted standards below which things must not fall. Above and beyond awareness about the virtues of ethos comes vigilance for its redaction, renewal, and rethinking. No rule of the game will be valid forever. In any given civilized context, people function within an accepted understanding of what is expected of them, be it within a religious or secular worldview. Considering that the present rule of game is based on “social contract theory,” I feel the two major works of political thought in the past few decades, Rawls’s A Theory of Justice (1971) and Taylor’s A Secular Age (2007), are perfect examples of such renewal. Taylor even offers a new appellation the “social imaginary” for what people consider their understanding of the rules of the game. And of course, in the age of “modernity” and cultural pluralism, he adds the adjective modern and uses imaginary id a plural form: “modern social imaginaries” (Taylor 2007: 159–211). But now, what comprises ethos in general? As suggested in my methodology, a set of triumviri comprises the system. The first element of the triumvirate that I consider is the scope and framework of ethos.

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Temporal Scope: Past, Present, Future The first feature of ethos is that the general framework of the rules and their observation are eternal and endure, even if time and place determine their specific content and the intensity of their animation. No wonder that a Persian political tract of the third century CE, by a high priest of the Sassanid (224–651) era, warns public officials against violating “the logical rule of statesmanship.” In the author’s words, “Any king who abandons the reasonable rule of statesmanship under the pretext that it will not affect him… should be aware that the greater consequence will affect even his great-grandchildren” (Tansar 1354/1975: 52). Although Tansar talks about “the reasonable rule” within the political, I think his concept could be applied to all spheres of human life. In the context of the present book, for example, one could formulate it as “the reasonable rule of stewardship of presence and the political for playing human.” Such a rule does not recognize temporal limitation. Whoever abandons the reasonable rule has done it in her own peril. I am aware of how spatial and temporal aspects would affect the content of the rule observed, but the rule itself remains permanent. Those spatial and temporal variables accentuate, animate, and influence the degree to which a set of rules are applied and implemented, but the fact remains that there is an eternal framework for human beings who choose to live together. Within that framework, there are variables that define moral boundaries and the extent of their significance. A phrase I cherish in the English language is “crossing the line.” I understand it to have two meanings: One refers to crossing the human lines of decency in any given moment, and the other means ignoring cultural and contextual lines. By pointing to the temporal scope of past, present, and future, I have both meanings in mind. Observation of the lines in every step of the art of presence makes one proud historically, casts the present in a positive light, and serves as an ideal for posterity. For these reasons, the rules of the game help one face challenges and act despite them. How does one achieve this apparently monumental task? It may be both appropriate and revealing to begin the discussion of the scope of the ethos with the insights of the British historian/thinker who spent most of his professional life on studying the genesis, the rise, and the fall of civilizations, Arnold Toynbee. He places enormous weight on the principle of “challenge and response” as the working mechanism in any civilization

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production. Notions of civility and civitas are “not an entity but a relation” (Toynbee 1947: 60). They consist of relations between humanity and physical and geographical challenges, or challenges of other humans. Here, I take the status quo as the voice of tradition and rising challenges as the voice of the future, where human beings stand in the middle as the voice of the present. In other words, any time an individual or a collective (the present, accompanied with the past) encounters a new phenomenon (the future), there are two aspects to the encounter. One relates to the intensity of the challenge and the other relates to the quality of the response. Moderate challenges from the point of the view of the respondent contribute to proper and constructive responses, while extreme ones may incapacitate the respondent. It is not at all surprising that in areas of extreme geographical, environmental, and climate challenges (such as extreme cold or extreme heat), one may see a good amount of individual civility but no record or trace of sophisticated civilizations, in the sense of comprehensive, concomitant, and convivial production. Having said this does not mean that there is a golden rule establishing a happy medium (ibid.: 140–163); instead, the key factor relates to the second dimension, i.e., the quality of responses to the challenges. In terms of the content of the responses to a given new challenge, Toynbee categorizes them as the two extremes he calls Herodian and Zealot. “The ‘Herodian’ is the man,” Toynbee writes, “who acts on the principle that the most effective way to guard against the danger of the unknown is to master its secret” (ibid.: 172). As for the Zealot, he writes: “The ‘Zealot’ is the man who takes refuge from the unknown in the familiar… tries to take cover in the past, like an ostrich burying its head in the sand to hide from its pursuers” (ibid.: 167 and 172). Both positions fall short of being proactive, the first by “discarding his traditional art and learning to fight his enemy with the enemy’s own tactics and own weapon” (ibid.: 172), while the second by “practicing his own traditional art of war with abnormally scrupulous exactitude” (ibid.: 167). In a way, both are mimetic in that the first mimics the challenge of the present and the future wholeheartedly while the other mimics the past without any questioning of it. What is tragic is that even if they succeed completely, both will have only short-term or minimal success. As Toynbee writes, “their utmost possible success is the negative achievement of material survival…. Neither the one nor the other is in the position to make any creative contribution to this living civilization’s further growth” (ibid.: 176–177).

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These two positions are revealing, but I think there is another extreme position that Toynbee either had not encountered or overlooked, namely the Eclectics, who turn both their own tradition (the past) and that of the challenger (the future) into mere instruments. The Eclectics are either paranoid or shortsighted opportunists, seeing everything either as a threat or as an instrument for their own advantage. The paranoid and the shortsighted internalize this attitude of mind so much that they turn their own value system into a mere instrument of material gain and portray those of their opponents as an ideology of the devil. For example, contemporary “Islamists” are a good case in point. They have turned their own tradition of Islam into an instrument of power, and at the same time, they have reduced the sophisticated Western tradition to the mere utility of applied science when it suits them, and condemn it as satanic ideology when that can serve their selfish attitude. Sheer instrumentalism will achieve nothing but the destruction of contemporary life and, ultimately, the destruction of the local and the external value systems they encounter. The tragedy of September 11, 2001, presents the most acute manifestation of such eclectic opportunism, with no result other than short- and long-term negativity, tragedy, and destruction. In a way, the Zealot, the Herodian, and the Eclectic have one thing in common: In the end, they are all enemies of any ethos. For Toynbee, the proper human response is a paradox, requiring that one neither give in easily nor try too hard. Indeed, he argues that the constructive way to respond to any challenge is a moderate approach. Approvingly, he cites the words of British archaeologist Sir John Linton Myres (1859–1954), who suggests that the quality of human determination leads to civilization production. Note the insights in the passage he cites from Myres: “if Necessity be the mother of Invention, the other parent is Obstinacy, the determination that you will go on living under adverse conditions rather than cut your losses and go where life is easier” (cited in Toynbee 1947: 85). The creative process of perseverance requires what Toynbee calls “a dynamic act” (ibid.: 86). How should one act in a dynamic way in the face of and despite challenges? The response of the Zealot is to be a hostage to the past; that of the Eclectic is to be entangled with the present, while that of the Herodian is to be caught up by the future. Toynbee’s argument appears well constructed and sound, but I argue that “a dynamic act” cannot be a reaction or even a response of any kind; it is “action” in the Arendtian sense of the word. And it happens when

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one is devoted mentally and committed in practice to action; that is, when one focuses on the right thing to do and considers whatever happens on the way as mere “accidents” that one might observe but which should not distract one from goals. In other words, one should “keep one’s eye on the ball,” as the common wisdom suggests. I am not suggesting or condoning the often devilishly practiced “end justifies the means,” which could never be acceptable, considering human beings can never grasp the complete consequences of their actions. I mentioned before and repeat it again that, à la Max Weber, the ethics of responsibility should always guide one’s measures, and in light of that, one should keep one’s focus “on the ball,” and the ball has been shaped with the past, the present, and the future. The temporal triumvirate above suggests that any ethos must be formulated in terms of the eternal and must consider all three epochs in an interactive and yet moderate fashion, because the notion of the right thing has no expiration date. As human beings, we are loyal to our respective past (tradition) through the passion of our heart and to the future through the hopes and aspiration of our souls, and we negotiate with the present through the imagination of our mind. The necessary condition is to take challenges seriously and in a collectively self-aware fashion bring the future and the past together. An ethos clinging to the past only amounts to mimicry of the Zealots, while an ethos of Herodian daydreaming about the future will have no authenticity or root. In short, a future without strong links to the past has no root; the past without concern for the future has no horizon, while a present without concern for both has neither aspiration nor depth. To achieve this magical mix requires hard work and suffering with the result of pioneering a new civitas. As Toynbee puts it, “after many vicissitudes, the sufferer triumphant serves as the pioneer” (ibid.: 67). I find a poetic affirmation of the significance of tradition in one of the responses of the contemporary American philosopher/jurist, Ronald Dworkin (1931–2013), in an interview. It appears in a comment on a piano performance by the Austrian pianist Alfred Brendel (b. 1931) as follows: Why does he think what he’s playing is better than other interpretations? He must think it is better and the question is why. It’s not because what he plays is more beautiful than what he might otherwise play. Because if he was aiming at beauty, he could depart from what the composer had

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written. But he is faithful to the composition. And yet, he’s not just playing the composer’s music, he’s interpreting it. (Jeffries, 2011, The Guardian)

The key is to interpret the composition within the parameters of the original piece. Ethos works the same way. It establishes the ways of the future for the present time within the bound of its respective tradition. There is a constant interaction between the three in a dynamic fashion. One must constantly maneuver, standing consciously at the present as a guardian of the past and a vanguard of the future. Is this what the poet T. S. Eliot (1888–1965) meant when he said poets must write as part of a tradition that they preserve and reshape it at the same time? This framing of scope is not the work of just one person or even a select group, but rather the result of the participation of everyone, or of at least enough people to create a critical mass that turns into a system. This illustrates that the biggest threat to dynamism in the temporal scope occurs where the content of any one of these phases is treated as eternal, a phenomenon we see in traditionalism, opportunism, and modernism. This will lead me to the next triumvirate, which addresses comprehensively all aspects of the scope that in turn attracts and encourages people to participate.

Human Spheres: Economy, Society, Polity Acceptance and endurance of the rules of the game depend on how closely they cater to the needs and the wants of person of presence. We can only cater to those aspects if we acquire a good knowledge of them. Aristotle thinks that we know of and about the rules of the game through a line of enquiry he calls “practical knowledge.” To arrive at this conclusion, he offers an interesting typology of human knowledge. According to him, human beings make sense of the world by: (1) theoretical science (“episteme”), (2) artisanship (“techne,” that is, making sensible and useful objects), and (3) practical wisdom or prudence (“phronesis,” that is discovering or initiating sensible and workable rites and ethos). As he writes, “Theoretical Science, therefore, is the quality whereby we demonstrate… namely, that a man knows a thing scientifically when he possesses a conviction arrived at in a certain way, and when the first principles on which that conviction rests are known to him with certainty” (NE: 1139b). Technical knowledge, or “art” as Aristotle calls it, “deals with bringing something into existence; and to pursue an art means, to

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study how to bring into existence a thing which may either exist or not, and the efficient cause of which lies in the maker and not in the thing made” (ibid.: 1140a). The most relevant aspect of his typology relevant to the conversation here is practical knowledge or prudence, which, for Aristotle, … is not the same as science. Nor can it be the same as art. It is not Science, because matters of conduct admit of variation; and not art, because doing and making are generically different, since making aims at an end distinct from the act of making, whereas in doing the end cannot be other than the act itself: doing well is in itself the end. It remains therefore that it is a truth-attaining rational quality, concerned with action in relation to things that are good and bad for human beings. (ibid.: 1140b)

Those areas that directly bear on “things that are good and bad for human beings” include three areas that have been called the economy or household, society or civil association, and the polity or the institutions dealing with the common good. All three are related but I will deal with them individually because of their special functions. The economy facilitates and guarantees humanity’s earthly survival on earth; society assures and maintains smooth interaction between humans in their dealings with one another; and the polity upholds and delivers “common good,” which includes opening the spaces of security, hope, aspirations, and meaning. The three have always been with humanity and will remain so. While Aristotle terms them the household, the community, and the polity, Charles Taylor discusses all three under the rubric of “social selfunderstanding,” but he uses a more contemporary vernacular to convey them. In his words: “There are in fact three important forms of social selfunderstanding which are crucial to modernity…. They are respectively the economy, the public sphere, and the practices and outlooks of democratic self-rule” (2004: 69). I will say a few words about each. The economy relates to rules Aristotle calls Oikonomikè, by which he means the possibility of activity for using wealth to achieve the highest good in the material aspect of life, i.e., satisfying the requirement of living well. Our natural and animal dimension drives humanity toward survival and the economy. I contend that Aristotle is right in identifying the three principles of exchange, equality, and reciprocity as shaping the working of a well-functioning economy. For Aristotle, exchange “arises first from what is natural, from, the circumstance that some have too little,

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others too much” (The Politics : 1257a). To explain the exchange, Aristotle distinguishes between the notions of “use” and “exchange” values, the prominent concept in all forms of economies. For economies to function smoothly necessitates some form of equality, the best means of which is money, and Aristotle in fact argues that “it is necessary for everything to be expressed in money” (Nicomachean Ethics : 1133b). Money will serve as a common standard of measurement. Another aspect of equality for Aristotle manifests itself in the form of “reciprocity.” As he writes, “But in the interchange of services Justice in the form of Reciprocity is the bond that maintains the association: reciprocity, that is, based on proportion, not on the basis of equality” (1132b). In his influential text The Great Transformation, the Austro-Hungarian economic historian Karl Polanyi (1886–1964) rightly points out that the economy has devoured other areas, thereby affirming and updating Aristotle’s ideas. We should first note his observation about this change: “No society could, naturally, live for any length of time unless it possessed an economy of some sort; but previously to our time no economy has ever existed that, even in principle, was controlled by markets” (1944, reprint 1994: 45). Economy is a small part of the society; hence, the “economic system is, in effect, a mere function of social organization” (ibid.: 52). Moreover, its features include reciprocity, re-distribution, and householding, almost identical to the features described by Aristotle. In addition, when these features work properly, they prevent the commodification of three major elements that play active role in the economic sphere, namely labor, land, and money (ibid.: 75–76). Society relates to rules that facilitate the possibility of an activity Max Weber characterizes as having “some relation to the behaviour of other people” (1978: 26). If economic actions make it possible to pursue one’s personal needs and desires, driven by bodily necessities, social actions facilitate smoother interaction between people, guaranteeing mutual benefit. These actions address not only bodily needs and necessities, but also cover the combined dimensions of wants and intellectual stimulation. Social actions always require the presence of others, but in a purposeful way. In Weber’s depiction, an activity. … is only social when one person’s behaviour is related in its meaning to the behaviour of other people. For example, a collision between two cyclists is a mere occurrence, like a natural event. But, when they try to give way to

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each other, or when they engage in insults, fisticuffs, or peaceful discussion after the collision, this does count as “social action.” (ibid.)

According to Weber, all social actions are (1) “rational” toward an end or for the realization of some absolute values; (2) “effectively determined” because of some impulse; and (3) “traditional,” that is the expression of accepted and set custom (ibid.: 28). All three forms of actions could come under the rubric of what Charles Taylor calls “benefits”; hence, the societal rule of the game serves the mutual benefits of members of society. As the cause of the formation of any society, the notions of “mutual benefits,” according to Taylor, has even been sanctified by the divine. In his words: “The order of mutual benefit was originally seen as God-created, and its fulfillment as God-destined” (2004: 186). As part of the political, the sphere of politics relates to the area in charge of securing the values that any given polity considers important and even eternal. The British statesman Lord Henry John Temple Palmerston (1784–1865) best formulated it in an 1848 speech to the House of Common as follows: “… I say that it is a narrow policy to suppose that this country or that is to be marked out as the eternal ally or the perpetual enemy of England. We have no eternal allies, and we have no perpetual enemies. Our interests are eternal and perpetual, and those interests it is our duty to follow.” The notion of interest is in the plural for a reason. The rule that helps the political aspect of spatial scope should facilitate all interests, hence the focus of politics as the common or general good. Aristotle used to call this the highest form of good that politics will nurture in a polity. In his words: “while all partnerships aim at some good the partnership that is the most supreme of all and includes all the others does so most of all, and aims at the most supreme of all goods; and this is the partnership entitled the state, the political association” (The Politics: 1252a). Taylor echoes the same notion, but he explains it, à la Rousseau, through the working of the individual’s will, which society harmonizes, and says its ultimate voice is “the general will.” In his words, all human interests and desires “fuse together in the rational and virtuous human being into a love of the common good, which in the political context is known as the general will” (2004: 118). In the practical meaning of the term, politics protects and maintains the demands of the common good or the general will through an elaborate mechanism of production and distribution of power, known

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in the academy as “public policy and administration.” While the political focuses on the broader questions of why, what, and how, human beings order their life together through politics such that, in the words of American political scientist, Harold Laswell (1902–1978), politics also determines “who gets what, when and how” (1936). Even more concise and more relevant are the words of Canadian American political scientist David Easton (1917–2014), who writes that politics is about “authoritative allocation of values” (1953: 41). In what realms are political values formulated, articulated, and expressed? This is my next question.

Societal Realms: Private, Social, Public In Chapter 2, I treated the triumvirate of personal, collective, and universal under the heading of commitment. I finished that section by stating that personal presence guarantees individual desires and ideals, the collective serves the mutual benefit of members of any given association or community, and the universal caters to the preservation and enhancement of our existential quantitative and qualitative conditions, in that we are earth-bound creatures, i.e., we are aboard the “mother-ship.” Here, one faces the question of what form of ethos helps to foster those three categories. I feel the corresponding secure and nourishing spheres that make those demands in reality amount to private, social, and public spheres, respectively. What are they? One way to address this question is to compare the household, associations, and the polis. These easily and nicely correspond to Arendt’s activities of labor, work, and action, as discussed in the previous chapter. In other words, to take care of one’s necessities and desires, one requires occasions and places that are personal and private. We begin with the household: Nowhere does one find a space better and more secure than one’s home, or what Arendt calls “natural community” because, “The distinctive trait of the household sphere was that in it, men lived together because they were driven by their wants and needs. The driving force was life itself” (1958: 30). This is the sphere where life itself is produced, maintained, and endures, but more importantly it is the sphere where one recuperates and regenerates. It is also a place of refuge from the intrusive tendency of the collective and the public. In the euphoria of information revolution and mushrooming of mass media, people did not sufficiently consider the intrusive power they could exert. Only when the initial enthusiasm subsided did people begin to see the hidden power

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of major global information companies such as Google and Facebook. Also neglected was the enormous power that information technology and processing have afforded to states in monitoring and recording citizens. In fact, the private sphere, or the household, if one approaches it with mindful care and consciousness, can still offer protection from the peril of the social and the public. No wonder that both historically and particularly in modern thought, private property has been so emphasized. As Arendt puts it, in a warning tone, … the four walls of one’s private property offer the only reliable hiding place from the common public world, not only from everything that goes on in it but also from its very publicity, from being seen and being heard. A life spent entirely in public, in the presence of others, becomes, as we would say, shallow. (ibid.: 71)

Why shallow? Because every move one makes is a show, absent of genuine, sincere, or unaffected presence. Thus, positively, the private and the household offer a space where one can and should practice solitude. In the household, one needs no mask to “save face” or make sure all forms of “correctness” are observed. One can and should be able to be authentic, knowing that there are unconditional love and support. Here, one’s idiosyncrasies are “normal” and accepted. One genuinely experiences many occasions of trial and error without any fear of being judged, let alone punished; hence, one develops in the most authentic fashion with a powerful sense of confidence and self-worth. In an interesting way, the private sphere or the household is needed to prepare one for the collective and the public realms. I parse the collective next. The collective refers to any form of association or society which the individual considers useful for his or her benefit. And since it is a gathering of like-minded people, whether for economic, civic, cultural, or political advantages, it serves the mutual interests of members. In turn, any association or society, in the words of Arendt, … expects from each of its members a certain kind of behavior, imposing innumerable and various rules, all of which tend to “normalize” its members, to make them behave, to exclude spontaneous action or outstanding achievement… [Moreover,] it embraces and controls all members of a given community equally and with equal strength. (ibid.: 40–41)

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Utility and utilitarian approaches dominate all aspects of the collective or the social, hence a strong demand for uniformity, “corporate individual” and uniform procedures. The danger of the collective and the social, if it dominates and overtakes other realms, is “mass society,” and the herd mentality that Nietzsche warned was emerging in Europe of his time, “a herd animal, something well-meaning, sickly, and mediocre has finally been bred: the European of today” (Beyond Good and Evil; Part III: Aphorism 62). He did not live long enough to observe how Polanyi’s “great transformation” has turned the collective and public realms into the private realms at the service of the household, where the highest form of value has become the economic bottom line. Economy has become the master. This enormous misfortune has made the collective and the public serve the private, with the effect of reducing the totality of human life to mere existence. The private only partially constitutes the human condition, and it is the necessary condition that makes possible the manifestation of presence and the unique individuality of every human soul. The public realm, as Arendt writes, “was reserved for individuality; it was the only place where men could show who they really and inexchangeably were” (1958: 41). I think this shows a much deeper understanding than Habermas’s account of the public sphere, which has become the dominant paradigm in the discourse on the subject. In his view, the public sphere is “the realm of our social life in which something approximating public opinion can be formed” (1974: 49). Habermas also does not attend to the important distinction that exists between civil society, which for me belongs to the realm of the social for the purpose of some specific topics, and the public sphere, which is more than the will or the desires of the people. The public realm reflects the public or the common good. It is not that it ignores the collective good, but by imaginatively incorporating it, it refines, and in Taylor’s words goes beyond, specific topics. The public sphere, as he writes, “is something different. It transcends such topical spaces. We might say that it knits together a plurality of such spaces into one larger space of nonassembly” (2004: 86). To have presence extends beyond the private and the collective realms and in the end finds expression and manifestation in the public sphere, where everyone’s uniqueness as “who” one is becomes apparent. If I might apply the overworked Marxian distinction between “use and exchange values,” human beings produce and use tangible values in the private realm and produce and exchange tangible value in collective realm.

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Then, in the public realm, humans use both values in order to imagine, reveal, and create intangible meanings and qualities, which transform their making a living into “making a life,” worth fighting for, worth sacrificing one’s life for, and narrating it as an ideal story. It is no surprise that when the Athenian statesman Pericles (495–429 BCE) describes his polis he declares the following: Here each individual in interested not only in his own affairs but in the affairs of the state as well: even those who are mostly occupied with their own business are extremely well-informed on general politics-this is a peculiarity of ours: we do not say that a man who takes no interest in politics is a man who minds his own business; we say that he has no business here at all.

“Has no business here” may sound harsh and condemning but seen in another light it is quite a factual statement. If an individual only concentrates on the personal and the chosen collective interests and values without any regard for the benefit and demands of all, or the common good, then in the long run, there will not be a civilized context where the personal and the collective advantages can or will be secured and protected. To think, to speak, and to act as a member of res-publica is not a special virtue or a charity to one’s neighbors; it is a form of lowest and highest virtue at the same time, self-preservation and self-actualization, respectively. Nor is there any need to make it a crusade; it is simply performing human through the fulfillment of individual potential. Respublica literally means “the public matter,” i.e., something that relates to everyone; one could read the public affairs or even the public good in it. I use it to mean “the common good,” containing all three spheres of private, collective, and public for everyone, or as being used here in this book, for fifty-one percent of the people fifty-one percent of the time. But how one can approach this will be dealt with in my discussion of the next triumvirate.

Approaches: Inclusive, Meritocratic, Isonomic Ethos succeed to encourage presence in the political when and if it benefits everyone and applies to everyone in a similar fashion and if despite natural inequalities in human society, there exists some perceived notion of equality. Stated differently, a given ethos is successful when it considers

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each member of the polity as worthy and equal, and more practically as offering possible advantages, benefit, and capital. How does this condition come about? The triumvirate “inclusive, meritocratic, isonomic” would serve as a good tool. The first notion comes to mind in relation to the dichotomy of inclusion and exclusion. So, the first dimension of the approach in a successful ethos relates to the idea of inclusion. Empires work by taking an exclusionary approach, building imaginary or real walls, and constructing an intellectual dichotomy of us vs. them, whereas civility by its very nature requires inclusion. I think in the recent history of humanity no movement and no person can match the tenacity of the Civil Rights Movement and its most eloquent voice, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (1929–1968), who lost his life for the cause, for voicing and enhancing inclusivity. Neither the movement nor its leader asked for any special privilege for Black people, but rather fought for inclusion in the ideals of a society that in the eloquent language of the sixteenth president of the United States, Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865), was founded on the ideas of liberty and human rights: “Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal” (“The Gettysburg Address”). Nowhere, this is echoed more precisely than in King’s famous speech entitled “I have a dream,” delivered on August 28, 1963: I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream. I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up, live out the true meaning of its creed: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.” …With this faith we will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to go to jail together, to stand up for freedom together.

All individuals have their own creative minds, hence the need for recognition of each person’s achievement, and hence the notion of meritocracy. This is a universal truth and particularly important and valid in the modern world, where in the words of Karl Marx, there is not certainly anymore. In his words, “All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify” (Communist Manifesto: Chapter 1). In the absence of any solid criterion, what judges the propriety of an action? It seems the criterion suggested by Italian

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philosopher Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527) has become the accepted measure: “in the actions of all men, and especially of princes, where there is no impartial arbiter, one must consider the final result (si guarda al fine)” (The Prince: Chapter XVIII). What he means is that traditionally accepted sources of wisdom have lost their validity and we must look at actual results as the criterion by which to judge any undertaking. Thus, meritocracy at all societal levels should set the standard. Finally, the individuals share the same spirit of divinity (according to the sacred worldview) or conscience (according to the secular worldview), hence the need for a sense and a feeling of equality. The very first point to note here is that this feeling of equality is artificial, because it is impossible to undermine or ignore natural inequality, which is so dominant in the passion and the mind. Indeed, the quality of individual uniqueness makes any leveling and equality impossible. However, for smooth functioning of the social order, we create equal procedures before the law, hence the notion of the rule of law, a notion that should not be treated lightly. The rule of law is very different from rule by law, which turns the law into an instrument of a particular interest or at the service of an ideology. Herodotus’s depiction of how a political crisis was solved in ancient Persia is revealing. In 522 BCE, the king was murdered by his brother and a Magian called Gumata impersonated the dead king and ruled for eight months, only to be toppled by Darius (550–487 BCE), who later secured a major role for himself in Iranian history. Following the punishment of the imposter, the seven heads of major Persian families at the time gathered to decide the fate of the polity. In Herodotus’s words: “When the confusion had settled, five days later, the conspirators against the Magian held a debate about the entire condition of affairs” (The History of Herodotus. III: 79). One of them, Otanes, begins by describing the vice of personal rule and offers the rule of law for future order, in the form of a republic. He said, “When the people is ruler, in the first place its title is the fairest of all– namely, equality before the law [isonomy]; secondly, it dose none of things that I have objected against the monarch.…I vote therefore that we abolish the monarchy and increase the power of the people; for in the Many lies All” (ibid.: 80). One secures such a condition through the rule of law, a condition where everyone feels they have the same access to the source of authority as anyone else. As he puts it: “I will not rule or be ruled” (ibid.: 83). While the provisions of the law include and affect everyone equally, no one is dominated

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or forced to do things they otherwise would not do. In the words of Hannah Arendt, The equality attending the public realm is necessarily an equality of unequals who stand in need of being “equalized” in certain respects and for specific purposes. As such, the equalizing factor arises not from human “nature” but from outside, just as money— to continue the Aristotelian example—is needed as an outside factor to equate the unequal activities of physician and farmer. (1958: 215)

It is a condition of being neither superior nor inferior within the public realm. Hannah Ardent maintains that the Athenian polis created such a condition. In her words, “The polis was distinguished from the household in that it knew only ‘equals,’ whereas the household was the center of strict inequality. To be free meant both not to be subject to the necessity of life or the command of another and not to be in command oneself. It meant neither to rule nor to be ruled” (ibid.: 32). Note the last phrase is an almost verbatim repetition of Otanes; hence, it requires an artificial condition that can be understood through the notion of isonomy, a Greek combined word (Isos, meaning equal, and Nomos meaning of law and custom), literally meaning equal arrangement.

Ends: Integrity, Achievement, Flourishing In his well-known paper entitled “A Theory of Human Motivation,” the American psychologist Abraham Maslow (1908–1970) identified six needs in human beings: “physiological,” “safety,” “belonging and love,” “social needs” or “esteem,” and “self-actualization.” I am not so impressed with the first two because they only contribute to survival and making a living. I have already argued that playing human and civilization production contribute to making a life worth narrating. While ostensibly every form of human gathering offers some degree of safety and means of satisfying physiological needs, an ethos that contributes to the possibility of playing human focuses on the latter three, which I wish to re-name as “dignity, success, and flourishing.” I will show below how respect for one’s dignity generates a sense of belonging; the possibility of success generates esteem; and flourishing leads to self-actualization. Further, as shown in the previous chapters, the latter includes spiritual and moral

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dimensions, something interestingly Maslow himself came to recognize in last years of his life.3 Even though in the Aristotelean account, humans by nature are interested in community, and in Marxian understanding, they are “speciesbeing,” human beings are foremost individuals and care for their integrity and cherish their privacy and their self-worth. The recognition of this self-worth equates to a sense of dignity, the first component of the ends that any ethos should uphold and promote. Historically, it has manifested itself in two meanings: one as an underlying value that has been granted to human beings and should be respected due to its location within each human, and the second as something innate in human beings who are born with it. The two major human worldviews, i.e., sacred or divine-immanence and human-immanence, explain it in terms of an honor bestowed upon original humans by the sacred sources and/or by the notion inalienable right, respectively. For example, in the Judeo-Christian worldview, God made human beings after his own image: “So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them” (Genesis, 1: 27). In Islam, God made the first human being out of the best material (The Qur’an, 96:4), put his own breath in him (ibid.: 15:29 and 38: 72), then thought him “the names” (ibid.: 2:31), and bestowed upon him “the trust” (ibid.: 33:72). This meaning of integrity requires the formation of an ethos that reveres every individual as the courier of something sacred. The notion of honor killing in traditional societies, even if condemned by the modern secular views, stems from this inner logic; violation of one’s honor considered punishable by death. Remember the well-established practice of dueling in the West was also based on honor codes. Even though the Fourth Council of Lateran under Pope Innocent III (1160–1216) declared it illegal in 1215, it was still in common practice until World War II, even occasionally practiced until the late 1960s. According to the human-immanence worldview, human beings are rights-bearing agents who are born with inalienable rights; hence, integrity in this sense takes the form of dignity and requires guardianship, protection, and enforcement by any given ethos. For example, the 3 Note this passage: “Transcendence refers to the very highest and most inclusive or holistic levels of human consciousness, behaving and relating, as ends rather than means, to oneself, to significant others, to human beings in general, to other species, to nature, and to the cosmos” (Maslow 1971: 269).

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Universal Declaration of Human Rights explicitly states: “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.” It continues by surmising that, “They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood” (Article 1). Yechiel Michael Barilan, a professor of Tel Aviv University who does research in Bioethics and Medical Humanities, describes human dignity “as a background moral ethos of human rights” (2013: 1). And since under the human-immanence worldview, the rule of law is the supreme sovereign, and consequently, vigilante justice is unacceptable; the legal system and its procedures are responsible for adjudicating any violation of one’s dignity. Whether and if such violation deserves, punishment by death should be determined by law. Both meanings of dignity require recognition and vigilance. Dignity as honor demands the recognition that everyone displays the sacred in his/her unique way, while dignity as right requires robust mechanisms applied to everyone in the same way, without allowing any special status and distinction. It is interesting to note is that regardless of which worldview sets the rule of the game, both honor and rights shape our sense of self-worth. The second component of the triumvirate of ends in ethos relates to success, or at least to hope for achievement. In the first chapter, I claimed that one of the features of any civilized context relates to how attractive and inviting it is. One recognizes a civilized space by the direction of human migration. People, capital, and investment go toward what they consider to be “the land of opportunity.” Thus, a successful ethos encourages a sense of hope and possibility for a variety of achievements. One of my most striking first encounters in the contemporary West took place in my early days in graduate school in the United States. In one graduate seminar, the professor asked students what they aspired to do in life. When one of the students, whom I knew came from a modest social standing, said he hoped to become the president of the United States, I was shocked. Two things came to my mind: that he was a naïve idealist or presumptuous. Little had I grasped that the rules of the game in any developing society offer hope and aspiration for all. Civilized contexts are not ideal societies, but they generate hope, dreams, and possibilities. They are the land of buyers and not sellers. The customer is always right. One is innocent unless proven guilty. No one is above the order and borders of the society. There is a sense of a horizontal environment where everyone’s interest is guaranteed. In comparison, in conquering contexts or places on holiday from history, there is the land of sellers. One must

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feel grateful or apologetic and even often guilty. In cases where isonomy or a sense of equality before the law is officially declared, in practice there is rule by law and not the rule of law. In the words of Napoleon in George Orwell’s classic Animal Farm, some people are more equal than others. The horizon is defined from above and nothing is allowed unless granted from above, whereas in the ethos of the civilized context everything is allowed unless restricted for the sake of the public good. The public good trumps everything and the rule of law upholds and guarantees it. Indeed, it is in the public interest for the sake of the common good that hope and aspiration for success are kept alive and in active currency. The third angle of this triumvirate relates to flourishing, an idea that has gained currency recently, particularly with the publication of Charles Taylor’s major work A Secular Age in 2007. However, one can trace an interest in flourishing to the ideas of Aristotle, who labels it as eudaimonia, literally meaning “doing well and living well” (Nicomachean Ethics : 1095a). Considering this notion in the context of the ancient worldview, doing well and living well includes both secular and sacred living, particularly considering that Aristotle later adds that eudaimonia means acting “in conformity with excellence or virtue” (ibid.: 1098a). In the same fashion, but in my judgment more comprehensively than Aristotle, Taylor discusses human flourishing as a state and an experience of fullness. Because, in my reading, he applies this to both the individual and a society, it relates to the within and the without. For this reason, ethos plays an important role in encouraging flourishing, at least insofar as it can remove impediments that hinder individuals and the collective from achieving such a state or experiencing such moments. Ethos can set societal objectives as well as serve as a measure for the functioning of various components of society. In Taylor’s words, Every person, and every society, lives with or by some conception(s) of what human flourishing is: what constitutes a fulfilled life? What makes life truly worth living? What would we most admire people for? We can’t help asking these or related questions in our lives. And our struggles to answer them define the view or views that we try to live by, or between which we have. At another level, these views are codified, sometimes in philosophical theories, sometimes in moral codes, sometimes in religious practices and devotion. These and the various ill-formulated practices which people around us engage in constitute the resources that our society offers each one of us as we try to lead our lives. (2007: 16)

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The sense of fullness and human flourishing occurs in both sacred and secular worldviews. The difference relates to scope, in that the ethos in sacred immanence envisions flourishing in a combination of worldly success as well as in preparation for the life of the hereafter, while the ethos in secular immanence emphasizes the importance of ordinary life. For this reason, the distinction between the sacred and profane has no place in the first context, while it is extremely significant in the second. In the first, flourishing means atonement, and hence, its highest degree is “righteousness” or in Plato’s depiction the condition of everything fulfilling its proper innate nature and function. Proper order in the soul, in society, in the economy, and in politics represents justice and virtue. Even here, that proper order is equivalent to some form of self-flourishing. I captured the meaning of the demand of flourishing within the sacred worldview in cited passage from Rabbi Meshulam Zusya: “In the world to come I shall not be asked ‘why were you not Moses?’ I should be asked ‘Why were you not Zusya.’” In other words, why didn’t you fully live up to your own potential?” On the other hand, in the secular immanence worldview, flourishing means the actualization of all potentials, where either natural laws or positive laws set the limits of this actualization and encourage a person or a collective to act, using their resources and acting within the scope of voluntary and mutual consent.

Mechanisms: Participation, Due Process, Dialogue An ethos, rules of the game, and any social imaginary also concern themselves with the means of achieving the ends of dignity, success, and flourishing. Regardless of worldviews, whether divine-immanence or human-immanence, the means include participation of the people, at least fifty-one percent, clear and transparent processes, and open conversation about the mechanisms of implementing the accepted order and borders. As to the first, the most successful and enduring constitution in the modern world, i.e., the American Constitution, offers the clearest portrait of participation in its short preamble. “We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.” Even if a divine command had offered the Constitution, it would not be implemented unless most members of the society were to

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participate and “stand witness” to it. This is not just a promise for its establishment but a means of guaranteeing its endurance. Note that the phrase “we the people” comes first. As discussed in Chapter 1 of this book, in today’s estimation, at least fifty-one percent of the people need to participate in the creation and maintenance of a civilized context. The corollary to that statement is the conclusion that a proper ethos recognizes that participation serves to guarantee the active participation of at least fifty percent of eligible citizens. It uses many mechanisms to secure this guarantee. I will utilize the famous Weberian typology of why human beings follow and obey a set of rules as a way of explaining these mechanisms. Weber claims that people accept as “all ruling posers” or ethos, in my words here, whether “profane or religious, political and apolitical” (1958: 294), based on one or a combination of the following reasons. Adherence is based on: (1) “charismatic” leadership or “an extraordinary quality of a person, regardless of whether this quality is actual, alleged, or presumed” (ibid.: 295, italic in the original); (2) mores or “belief in the everyday routine as an inviolable norm of conduct” (ibid.: 296); and/or (3) “impersonal bound to the generally defined and functional ‘duty of office’” (ibid.: 298, italic in the original). Taylor calls this last one a contractual legal order for the “mutual benefit” of the society’s members. Relating it to the three forms of rationality, discussed in Chapter 2 under the subtitle of “Logos (reason),” and putting a positive light on it, ethos utilizes “normative, demonstrative and utilitarian” rationality to encourage participation. All forms of formal celebrations, whether the national day, Thanksgiving Day, or various commemoration ceremonies, are examples of power displays that encourage attraction to “our way of life,” “our greatness,” and so on. So are celebrations such as displays of scientific, economic, and artistic achievement of individuals or groups, even for ceremonies as small in scale as “employee of the year.” In his book Trust: The Social Virtue and the Creation of Prosperity (1995), the American thinker Francis Fukuyama (b. 1952) speaks of “high trust” and “low trust” countries, which seems to compare what I have called “developing” societies on the one hand with “conquering societies or the ones on holiday from history” on the other hand. The former has managed to generate so much trust among their members that they feel motivated to participate and, in Fukuyama’s words, to produce prosperity. These members perform their human role as citizens to the best of their abilities and to the fullest of their potential. So, trust seems

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to be at the heart of the well functioning of ethos. That alone, however, cannot serve as the means; there has to exist also a well-placed and robust due process, where the relations between ends and means are clearly mapped and the rules of game work in impersonal and uniform fashion. In other words, for humans to feel secure enough to participate fully in society, there must be a process of putting their minds at peace. Due process seems to do the trick, and in today’s world where the language of rights is so powerful, the legal notion of Habeas Corpus conveys the significance of the process. The phrase literally means “you shall have the body,” i.e., the court must have anyone accused of a crime presented before a tribunal to hear what the accused has been charged with. The corollary to this is the notion of “innocent until proven guilty.” It has its root in the 39th clause of the 1215 British charter of liberties known as the “Magna Carta”: “No freeman shall be taken or [and] imprisoned or disseized or exiled or in any way destroyed, nor will we go upon him nor send upon him, except by the lawful judgment of his peers or [and] by the law of the land.” To me, when alleged criminals are protected as such, then the feeling of trusting the polity in average citizens would be “high.” That trust guarantees due process, a universal rule in any civilized context. The story of the erection of the famous Mosque–Cathedral of Cordoba provides a good example: When the Arabs captured Cordoba at the beginning of the century [eighth century], they had extended the eastern practice of appropriating half of the main cathedral for their worship. This building had originally been a Roman temple dedicated to the god Janus…. Now that Muslim population of the capital was growing, Abd ar-Rahman decided to enlarge and beautify the edifice. He entered into negotiations to buy the Christian half from the Christian community for 100,000 gold pieces. (Irving 1973: 126–127)

Abd ar-Rahman I (731–788) was a conqueror with a vision, and he established what became a Muslim civilization in Spain. He could have simply taken over the holy site as a conqueror, but he realized that following due process held significance. Not only due process, but all aspects of ethos require updates and adjustments to the challenges of time and place. What keeps this process of constant evolution at work? I think the big conversation that has led to amazing scientific, artistic, literary, historical, and imaginative human

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innovations constitutes the answer. Without an ongoing dialogue at personal, collective, and general levels, little performing human or civilization production would have been possible. At the personal level, it takes the form of, in the words of Arendt, “a silent conversation with between me and myself”; at the collective level, it takes the form of conversation within and among members of various civic organizations; and at the general level, it takes the form of the battle of ideas in the public sphere. The significance of dialogue and the big conversation has its roots in the fact that the capacity for speech and language distinguishes human beings from other creatures. Two distinct approaches have defined language and its function in human existence. To understand these, I rely on Taylor’s recent book The Language Animal (2016). The first approach, positivism, considers language as an instrument of communication and means of interacting in the service of labor and work: In short, language is “a vehicle of ideas.” Figures such as Hobbes, Locke, and the French philosopher Étienne Condillac (1714–1780) take this position. For them, language facilitates calculating, mapping, and problem-solving, functioning as an “encoding,” because it “opens us to the domain it encodes” (ibid.: 39), whether in terms of material production or solving societal issues. Here, we are delving into the world of instrumental efficacy, if you like; language empowers us to have, as Taylor cites Hobbes, “dominion over our imagination” (in ibid.: 5). Taylor calls this approach an “enframing and designative instrumental” theory. The another approach, broadly cast as humanism, sees language as a constitutive dimension of being human that empowers us to perform “action” in human conduct, or again, enables “expression of the self.” For example, three German philosophers, Johann Georg Hamann (1730– 1788), Ferdinand von Humboldt (1767–1835), and Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744–1803), argue that language has a direct link to human conscience and consciousness. Taylor calls this approach “constitutive and expressive” theory and, elaborating on the distinction, insists on the significance of the second theory. Language as a vehicle of delivering something relates to “means,” whereas language as constitutive dimension of being human relates to ends and to a sense of “rightness” or “acting out of sensitivity to issues of intrinsic rightness” (ibid.: 11). In the latter, as Taylor puts it, “Language is the domain of right and wrong moves…. We are in the domain of intrinsic rightness” (ibid.: 261). This is quite accurate in that action, in the Arendtian sense discussed in

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Chapter 2, embodies the “right thing to do,” and it is through language that action can be narrated and remembered and its players can achieve immortality. But one may ask, if language and speech are directed at ends and belong to the realm of quality, why have I classified them under the category of means within my discussion of ethos or the rules of the game? There are two possible answers. One relates to the fact that language in realms of labor and work indeed functions as an instrument of problemsolving, but when it comes to action its role goes beyond being simply vehicle of ideas, but rather it is the very embodiment of presence. The second relates to the fact that only while discussing the social imaginary and its rules of the game is “language or dialogue” classified as a mechanism. Insisting on language as means or mechanism enables the state to utilize it as power or force in dealing with general public, while insisting on language as a constitutive dimension for interaction empowers people to resist instrumentalized manipulation of language. Arendt insists that a society that fosters lives worthy of being called human, or as I term it, lives characterized by presence or civility, is one “in which speech and only speech made sense and where the central concern of all citizens was to talk with each other” (1958: 26). Even this may have a trace of utility, but she does clarify that through speech, “men distinguish themselves instead of being merely distinct; they are the modes in which human beings appear to each other, not indeed as physical objects, but qua men” (ibid.: 176). Speech constitutes an intrinsic aspect of any action; hence, as Charles Taylor has shown, human beings are dialogical. The German novelist and essayist Thomas Mann (1875–1955) even goes further and maintains: “Speech is civilization itself. The word, even the most contradictious word, preserves contact—it is silence which isolates” (1927: 518). What guarantees the maintenance of the precious virtue of dialogue and speech is freedom, a notion that I will treat as the last triumvirate of this chapter.

Freedom: Negative, Affirmative, Assertive What guarantees the proper functioning, the preservation, and the integrity of the three spheres enumerated above? In Chapter 1, I suggested in passing that freedom serves as the “vital impetus” (elan vital ) in the life of any creative person, community, historical phase, or era. Arendt considers freedom the main reason people come together in any given society. Without freedom, not only creativity but life itself

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loses meaning. In her words, “… freedom, which only seldom—in times of crisis and revolution—becomes the direct aim of political action, is actually the reason that men live together in political organization at all. Without it, political life as such would be meaningless. The raison d’être of politics is freedom, and its field of experience is action” (1968: 146). The profound insight here is that when it is in danger, i.e., in moments of crisis, civil war, and revolution, one must consciously work for its restoration. Without this, the pursuit of meaningful action will not be possible. Now, the degree and the form of freedom may differ in various contexts, but its presence in a civilized context is as vital as air. Thus, any ethos should not only emphasize freedom but also, more importantly, should guarantee its maintenance. At the same time, once again, I remind the reader that human sphere is about “game changers,” “critical mass,” “tipping points,” and a condition of minimizing pain. The promised condition of heaven is an ideal and exists in the ideal or in the hereafter, if one believes in it, where humanity no longer lives under the “human condition,” but rather the divine one. I have suggested here that the condition of fifty-one percent is a workable and fair condition. Thus, I suggest that the ethos of any given civil and dynamic condition must rely on freedom. Nevertheless, what does the notion mean? In his most celebrated work “Two Concepts of Liberty,” the question of “what or who is the source of one’s decision?” If the source of any given decision lies within the inner self of the agent-actor, then the person is exercising freedom. For Berlin, positive freedom comes from the desire to be one’s own master. In his words, “I wish, above all, to be conscious of myself as thinking, willing, active being, bearing responsibility for my choices and able to explain them by reference to my own ideas and purpose” (1958: 16). I have made a conscious decision TO be free. Thus, positive freedom is associated with the preposition TO. Do these two forms of freedom capture a thorough understanding of freedom? I contend they do not. Something is missing. Once again, the three-part approach proves useful. In the last section of the last chapter, I spoke of the three activities that any person with presence must be mindful of and perform. Following Arendt, these were the activities of labor, work, and action. A related but somewhat different designation for freedom should correspond. I offer a three-part understanding under the rubric of negative, affirmative, and assertive forms of freedom. Just as the triumvirate of labor, work, and action covers all aspects of human life, so

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does this triumvirate. Indeed, negative freedom helps satisfy the necessities of life, affirmative freedom facilitates utility, and assertive freedom makes possible action and opens the possibility of immortality. They offer three forms of individual human attitudes (presence), collective mores (ethos), and the preconditions for the working of the public sphere (theater). I will parse and deconstruct each. I share Berlin’s understanding of negative freedom, and I owe a great debt to him. I extend the source of need for negative freedom to other constraints, bounds, and confines that stem from any source, human institutions, and outside authorities included. Obviously, an external force, a totalitarian regime, or an ideological system curtails one’s ability to remove and limit one’s negative freedom by imposing various restraints. Nevertheless, sometimes one imposes constraints on oneself by becoming a servant to physical or sensual necessities. Sometimes an accident may restrict one’s freedom. This may be the reason why Arendt associates the activities of labor with human necessities that imposes impediments that oppose negative freedom. As she writes, “Man cannot be free if he does not know that he is subject to necessity, because his freedom is always won is his never successfully attempt to liberate himself from necessity” (1958: 121). Human necessities, survival, and attempts to guarantee progeny all impose restraints on negative freedom. It is within this spirit that Kant invites man to emerge “from his self-imposed nonage” (as he puts it in the very first sentence of his famous essay, “What is Enlightenment?”). One guarantees negative freedom through double resistance: internal strife to rise about those necessities through work and external vigilance and struggle to ward off against any outside imposition. Affirmative freedom relates to the second form of human activity which Arendt calls “work.” It is a form of freedom that responds to the question of “what means does one have to pursue one’s wants?” Suppose one enjoys all the negative freedom in the world, but one lacks the means to pursue one’s desire. How can one achieve affirmative freedom? For example, everyone enjoys negative freedom on the project of going to the moon—no restraint whatsoever. Many are interested in doing so, but very few people have the means to do so. The affirmative form of freedom would address and remedy this. Affirmative freedom relates to the question of “what is the area where the subject feels deprived and that there is a need for remedy?” It is associated with the preposition “FOR.” One must enjoy freedom for achieving something. So, does one enjoy affirmative freedom for pursuing one’s objective? For example, the

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whole purpose of the commission on “Truth and Reconciliation” in South Africa was to provide for such a freedom, just as the whole program of affirmative action in the United States was to guarantee this kind of freedom. It is through such affirmative actions that agents/actors can feel empowered enough to embark upon achievements, progress, and development. In societal and political spheres, this form of freedom relates to the notion of “equality” or at least a sense of equality. It gives the impression to the citizens that they have equal opportunity, access, and possibilities. Affirmative freedom, in my use of the term, relates to the means available to the agent who has decided to pursue his desires. Note that many philosophers, from Hobbes onward, have argued for negative freedom as one’s birthright, but many argue for affirmative freedom rights as well. Consider the example of higher education: Not only is there negative freedom for pursuing advanced studies, but some advocate for the universal right to higher education. In asking for “free tuition,” one is really asking for affirmative freedom for all. At the same time, however, such measures come with the danger of “the road to serfdom,” in the words of Austrian-British Economist and philosopher Friedrich Hayek (1899–1992). According to him: Although the professed aim of planning be that man should cease to be a mere means, in fact—since it would be impossible to take account in the plan of individual likes and dislikes–the individual would more than ever become a mere means, to be used by the authority in the service of such abstractions as the “social welfare” or the “good of the community.” (2006: 99–100)

The third form of freedom, assertive freedom, is ironic in that it is neither a right nor a privilege, but a responsibility. It invites the agent to take the driver’s seat and make decisions. It is an invitation and a challenge for one to take to heart the following motto I have formulated: “Audete vos Liberare” (Dare to be Free). In this form of freedom, to be free requires courage. No surprise that Arendt writes how that the ancients admired courage which made it possible to act as a free agent and transcend “the mere togetherness imposed on all–slaves, barbarians, and Greeks alike—through the urgencies of life” (1958: 36). While assertive freedom constitutes an enormous virtue and privilege, it is also a substantial responsibility. In addition, like all serious responsibilities, it is heavy, imposes demands, and almost entirely depends on individual’s will and

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determination. It is a form one actively chooses even though it imposes limits. The French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) calls this “moral liberty,” which, in his words, “alone makes him [any human] truly master of himself; for the mere impulse of appetite is slavery, while obedience to a law which we prescribe to ourselves is liberty” (The Social Contract, Book I, Chapter viii). I will refer to three aspects of these demands and responsibilities here. Primarily, it requires an internal awakening with a strong impulse in order that: (a) The heart desires it, (b) the mind grasps it as value, and (c) the body is anxious to move for it. Secondly, it requires subjective consciousness about the fact that it relates to: (a) quality, (b) empowerment, and (c) hope. Thirdly, assertive freedom requires the development of a resolute disposition. I am talking about training one’s mind for the practice of assertive freedom. One can achieve this through: (a) education and learning, (b) habituation or internalization, and (c) self-generalization and encouragement. Of the three forms of freedom, assertive freedom seems to be the most significant and fundamental for the following reasons. It is the most abstract and intangible of the three. Its lack thereof is not apparent. When autocratic regimes impose restraints on people’s freedom, when slavery chains people, when bullies and abusers disrupt the lives of their victims, and when ideological systems limit human freedom under the rubric of righteousness, it is objectively recognizable. When one faces discrimination in the hiring process, when monetary or class privileges take away opportunity, when ideological regimes privilege official members of the ruling party, and so on, one objectively observes the lack of affirmative freedom. This makes it easier for the awakening of conscience, mobilization of forces, campaigns, revolts, and even revolution to occur. But what does one do when people do not even accept that they are not free? Studies have shown that in ideological regimes, it is not the charismatic power of the ideological elite or the eloquence of the message that guarantees success, but rather the power of silent consent and the complacency of the majority. Even in supposedly non-ideological and even democratic regimes, there is a risk of enchanting the people with softer means of persuasion and undermining their assertive freedom. In the words of the French philosopher and mystic Simone Weil (1909–1943), states do this by: … suggestion, propaganda, influence by means of obsession. These are methods of constraint, a special kind of constraint, not accompanied by

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fear or physical distress, but which is none the less a form of violence. Modern technique places extremely potent instruments at its service. This constraint is, by its very nature, collective, and human souls are its victims. (2005: 24)

The emergence of Reaganomics (beginning in 1980) that culminated in what I would call “Trumpism” (beginning in 2017) presents a perfect example. And this phenomenon has its strongest hold in the foremost “modern society,” as I will show in Chapter 7. The “means of obsession,” as Weil calls it, has neither an ideology nor a charismatic leadership, yet it is sweeping the globe at the beginning of the third millennium, and ironically in the age of World Wide Web, when various parts of the world are deeply connected. Many of the followers of these “means of obsession” enjoy a good degree of negative and even affirmative freedom, and yet most of them have no clue that they live in absolute mental servitude. The story of the person I call the miracle of the end of the second millennium and the advent of the new one, Nelson Mandela (1918–2013), may help me demonstrate the point more clearly. Before the apartheid regime exiled him to the Robben Island prison, he had some degree of negative freedom (he was active as a Black lawyer) and enjoyed some form of affirmative freedom (he had enough means and maneuverability to acquire a law degree and open a law firm by 1952), and he thought he was fighting for the cause of freedom. Ironically, he achieved assertive freedom in prison, while his negative and affirmative freedoms were curtailed drastically. Assertive freedom stems from within, and first and foremost it relates to inner forces. It is in this sense that assertive freedom serves as an engine, while negative and affirmative freedoms facilitate and foster flourishing. For this reason, there is a need for a place where the “battle of ideas” is encouraged. Negative and affirmative freedoms require positive steps and deliberate policies, while assertive freedom requires an inner conversation on the part of the individual and the possibility of the “marketplace of ideas” on the part of the collective. If one links these three forms of freedom to the triumvirate of labor, work, and action, negative freedom is needed for the condition of labor, affirmative freedom is needed for the condition of work, and assertive freedom is required for the condition of action. Even though assertive freedom appears more fundamental, it is the organic working of all three that makes for a robust

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ethos in all spheres of human activities, which I identify and discuss in the next chapter. ∗ ∗ ∗ As a way of summary, I offer a list of all triumviri in the following table. They collectively demonstrate the rules of the game in any given civilized context. The Rules of the Game (Ethos) Categories

Temporal Scope Human Spheres Societal Realms Approaches Ends Mechanisms Freedom

Spheres Passion (sense/heart)

Intellect (mind)

Spirit (soul)

Past Economy Private Inclusive Integrity Participation Negative

Present Society Collective Meritocratic Achievement Due Process Affirmative

Future Polity Public Isonomic Flourishing Dialogue (Speech) Assertive

The rules of the game, or etiquette, require some structure and organization that guards and guarantees the effective operation of that etiquette. It includes a constitution of some sort, an organizational structure, and their nuances, topics that I shall turn to next.

Sources Cited Arendt, Hannah.1958. The Human Condition. Chicago: Chicago University Press. ———. 1968. Between Past and Future; Eight Exercises in Political Thought. Enlarged Edition. New York: Viking Press. Barilan, Yechiel Michael. 2013. Human Dignity, Human Rights, and Responsibility; The New Language of Global Bioethics and Biolaw. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Easton, David. 1953. The Political System. An Inquiry into the State of Political Science. New York: Knopf. Hayek, Friedrich. 2006. The Road to Serfdom. New York: Routledge, Reprint. Habermas, Jurgen. 1974. “The Public Sphere: An Encyclopedia Article (1964). Translated by Sara Lennox and Frank Lennox. New German Critique 3: 49– 50.

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Herodotus. 1988. The History of Herodotus. Translated by David Grene. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Irving, T. B. 1973. Falcon of Spain: A Study of Eighth Century Spain, with special Emphasis upon the Life of the Umayyad Ruler Abd ar-Rahman I . 3rd ed., 756–788. Lahore: Sh. Muhammad Ashraf Publishers and Book Sellers. Laswell, Harold D. 1936. Politics: Who Gets What, When, How. New York: Wittlesey. Mann, Thomas. 1927. The Magic Mountain; a Novel. Translated by Helen Tracy Lowe-Porte. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Tansar. 1354/1975. Nameye Tansar [The Letter of Tansar]. Edited and an interpretive essay by Mojtaba Minovi and Esmaeil Rezvani. Tehran: Entesharat Kharazmi. Taylor, Charles. 2004. Modern Social Imaginaries. Durham: Duke University Press. ———. 2007. A Secular Age. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. ———. 2016. The Language Animal: The Full Shape of the Human Linguistic Capacity. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Toynbee, Arnold. 1947. Civilization on Trial. New York: Meridian Books. Weber, Max. 1958. From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology. Translated, Edited and with an Introduction by F. H. Greth and C. Wright Mills. New York: Oxford University Press. Weber, Max. 1978. Weber Selections in Translation. Edited by W. G. Runciman. Translated by Eric Mathews. Cambridge: The Cambridge University Press. Weil, Simone. 2005. The Need for Roots; Prelude to a Declaration of Duties towards Mankind. Translated from French by Arthur Wills with a preface by T. S. Eliot. New York: Routledge, Reprint.

CHAPTER 4

Theater, Structures, and Institutions

The world takes its forms and roles in this world – Which one of them belong to us? Rumi (Sonnet 239: 2). All the world is a theatre, and all the men and women merely players. Shakespeare, As You Like It, Act II, Scene VII.

Presence (personal disposition and “self-understanding”) and ethos (social dispositions or “social self-understanding”) appear to be abstract notions. Both presence and ethos find, however, practical expression in the concrete world or, more specifically, in an arena, so that the individual can experience a sense of self-worth as well as the societal values inherited or contracted for the polity. What kind of arena contributes to or has contributed to such fulfillment? The insightful observation of the Scottish Enlightenment philosopher David Hume (1711–1776) is revealing and instructive: “We are placed in this world, as in a great theater, where the true springs and causes of every event are entirely concealed from us; nor have we either sufficient wisdom to foresee, or power to prevent those ills, with which we are continually threatened” (2007: 41). At one level, Hume’s notion echoes Arendt’s notion of the earth as the quintessence of © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 F. Rajaee, Presence and the Political, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59487-9_4

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the human condition; at another level, it reminds us that we must work hard at making the earth fit for our needs, wants, and aspirations. The “theater” thus refers to the aggregate of artificial structures and institutions, at the service of presence to manifest itself in fitting with the determined framework and with temporal and spatial demands and challenges. In discussing ethos, particularly when explaining freedom, I argued that affirmative freedom plays a major role as a means or catalyst of making the external manifestation of negative and assertive freedoms possible. The following passage from Kenneth W. Thompson is worth noting: In our kind of world, collective instrumentalities are needed to serve the individual if he is to have a chance to realize his individuality. If he is to receive fresh water, good food, a living wage, and equal opportunities for education and employment, larger aggregates of responsible and representative men and women, joined together, must act in his behalf. (1975: 40)

Not only the construction but also the functioning of these “collective instrumentalities” must follow the rules that we discussed before; the reasonableness of being productive, useful, and practical; and, above all, meaningful and valuable. In other words, the triumvirate of subsistence, quantity, and quality must be at work even here. When these instrumentalities encourage the production of subsistence, stimulate the creation of useful things, and finally elevate human life qualitatively, then the polity or the theater has played its role well. However, if they fail in any of these areas, it is because something is missing. If there is lack of quality, one may even achieve rational order, even at enormous magnitudes, in the form of short-term conquests and power. We can see examples of this in the experiences of leaders such as Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan, and Napoleon Bonaparte, and in polities such as Sparta, the Soviet Union and its satellite states, Communist China, the Nazi Germany, fascist Italy, and the imagined dystopias of Huxley’s Brave New World and Orwell’s 1984. I think Aristotle understood better than anyone else the centrality of the “theater” in human life. While his mentor Plato considered it the space and the guardian of the ideal good, and on the opposite extreme, Hobbes considered it the great holder of order and security, Aristotle considered it the place where humanity becomes human within

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the plurality of other human beings. It offers an arena for human beings to display themselves and, as discussed in chapter two, to manifest their presence. This can only happen when the theater facilitates the realization of all aspects of the lifeworld that help humans flourish through the desires of the heart, the curiosities of the mind, and the longings of the soul. In this sense, the theater functions as both the arena and the instrument. Once again, time and space accentuate the content that orients that function, but the containers must follow some general patterns. For example, until modern times, the ideal form of government and polity was kingship. That form endured from the time of its original formation in Mesopotamia by the Sargon of Akkad in 2334 BCE, until January 21, 1793, when it was discredited symbolically through the beheading of the king in the street to the cheers of the crowed. I am of course referring to the hanging of Louis the XVI in daylight, with no fear of being stricken by higher forces for slaying the sacred body of king (Kantorowicz 1957). In the contemporary age of “rule by the people,” the democratic form has become the more accepted polity.1 This is so, even if it is, as Winston Churchill (1874–1965) has put it, with tongue in cheek, the “worst form”: “Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time” (1947: 207). The point is that

1 This table outlines the differences between the two polities:

Form Structure Functions

Sacred based

Secular based

Dictated Sacred and Profane Protection of the Life (here and hereafter)

Conjectured Economy, Society and Polity Production of life (here and now)

As the table shows, regardless of worldview, the theater must cater to all the needs, wants, and ideals of members of the polity. In the tradition-based polity, they were broader, while in the modern one, in the words of Charles Taylor, modernity “promotes ordinary life” even to the point that religious life also makes sense with it, because ordinary life serves as “a site for the highest form of Christian life” (2004: 74). Of course, even if one replaces the phrase “forms of Christian life” with any other forms of sacred or religious experience, the conclusion would be the same.

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this form of government does not impinge seriously on the playing of human or the production of civilization One more point to note relates to who owns the theater. Just as the theater belongs to all of us, its construction, maintenance, updating, and use also belong to us. Each person is responsible for it. The Iranian poet Siavash Kasraei (1927–1996) portrays human life on earth as a fireplace, a depiction that is relevant here: “Life is but an old fireplace; if you light the fire, the dance of its flames will be seen from far away. And if you do not, it will be dark; for which only you should be blamed.” What we make of the theater and what functions we assign to it remain our task and our responsibility. Nevertheless, the actual functions follow their own inner logic. What proves detrimental relates to whether the polity follows those proper functions, which I hope to delineate in the following few triumviri. A note about the triumviri in this chapter. While in the previous chapters the triumviri sometimes focused on two extreme positions and presented the third as a golden mean, and in some cases the triumviri corresponded to the functions of the heart, the mind, and the soul, here the triumviri refer to the functions of the structures and institution, respectively, at the service of the individual (the private interests), the collective (the social interests), and the common (the general interests). The first and most prominent one relates to the notion of governance.

Governance: Recognition, Friendship, Reverence/Glory The primary function of theater, regardless of place and time, resides in its role as facilitator of governance within the parameters of the set ethos. The Muslim thinker Ibn Khaldun (1332–1406), a forerunner of the modern disciplines of historiography, economics, politics, and anthropology—a combination he himself calls the “science of civilization”—poetically captures governance within any polity with the image of a garden as follows: The world (al-‘alam) is a garden, the fence of which is the sovereign (aldawla). The sovereign is an authority (sultan) through which life is given to proper conduct (al-Sunna). Proper conduct is a policy (siyassa) directed by the ruler (al-malik). The ruler is an institution (nizam) supported by the soldiers. The soldiers are helpers who are maintained by money. Money

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is sustenance brought together by the subjects (al-ra’iyya). The subjects are servants who are protected by justice. Justice is something familiar and through it, the world persists. The world is a garden… (1958: I: 81–82, minor editing in my part)

The last phrase points to the key notion of justice. After more than three decades of meditation on the political, I claim that this emphasis effectively captures now call governance, the essence of which could be captured in the following triumvirate: recognition, friendship, and esteem/glory. To phrase this as a question: Does the polity recognize the value of its citizens? Do citizens see the polity as a friend? Do members of the polity feel that as a people and as a unit they enjoy reverence and glory? In other words, governance refers to the ways in which the polity functions insofar as for the individual there is a degree of efficacy, for the collective a sense of communal friendliness, and for the whole republic a sense of glory and pride in being member of a polity. I will parse each of them. First, at an immediate and personal level, I would like to share with the reader the change in my understanding of the difference between dynamic and producing societies and those that are on holiday from history. As a student of “development,” I used to use the textbook criteria for the distinction between the so-called developed and developing societies and identify the former as meritocratic and the latter as nepotistic. Now, I think instead that in fact transparency and meritocracy occurs because of the process of civilization production. One significant feature that I have come to realize is the fact that in dynamic societies, the power of the people to destroy one another, regardless of political and social standing, is rather limited, whereas there is enormous possibility for helping and cooperating with one another. In societies that are too busy with conquest or are on holiday from history, even low-ranking bureaucrats have enormous power to destroy anyone they target, while their power to help is negligible or non-existent. Indeed, one could say that in places that are not players in the contemporary historical process, all citizens try to avoid any encounter with authorities since they are potential and actual nemeses or enemies. In a polity devoted to and serious about governance, almost everyone is included, since everyone, even at the lowest level of utility, is potential capital. Note how even in the ancient stratified societies divided among Courtiers, Councilors, and Commoners, the rule of civility included

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everyone, even if there was a stringent hierarchy of distributive justice at work. It was inclusive, even if in an unjust fashion. Note that in the modern worldview, where in theory everyone is a citizen, there still is a rather informal hierarchy at work. Now, three Es, the Elite, the Educators, and Entrepreneurs, have replaced the three Cs of the past, and the notion of meritocracy distributes bounty differently among these groups. The key idea or element for members is whether they feel their value is recognized and enjoy a sense of inclusion. John Stuart Mill’s observations on this bear repeating: The worth of a State, in the long run, is the worth of the individuals composing it, and a State which postpones the interests of their [emphasis in the original] mental expansion and elevation, to a little more of administrative skill, or of that semblance of it which practice gives, in the details of business; a State which dwarfs its men, in order that they may be more docile instruments in its hands even for beneficial purposes—will find that with small men no great thing can really be accomplished; and that the perfection of machinery to which it has sacrificed everything, will in the end avail it nothing, for want for the vital power which, in order that the machine might work more smoothly, it has preferred to banish. (2008: 128)

In general, though, no one appreciates the value of a person better than his or her friend. Hence, the second angle of governance relates to a sense of friendship that the polity must display toward citizens. Aristotle thinks it is necessary for any form of communal living. He begins Book VIII of The Nicomachean Ethics as follows: “Our next business after this will be to discuss Friendship. For friendship is a virtue or involves virtue; and it is one of the most indispensable requirements of life” (1155a). At the same time, Aristotle seems to talk about three forms of friendship, based on pleasure, utility, and the good in and of itself (Ibid.: 1156a), which resembles the three desires of humanity as well as the three forms of rationality discussed earlier. The sense of belonging and recognition strengthens the feeling of friendship. Indeed, Aristotle explicitly states in his work The Politics that friendship protects the state from crisis and destruction. In his words, “For we think that friendship is the greatest of blessings for the state, since it is the best safeguard against revolution, and the unity of the state” (1262b). Hence, the promotion of a sense of friendship for the polity proves essential. As he puts it, “The friendship of a king for his subjects

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is one of superiority in beneficence; for a king does good to his subjects, inasmuch as being good he studies to promote their welfare, as a shepherd studies the welfare of his sheep” (NE: 1161a). We saw in Chapter 2 how friendship begins with a person with presence who displays the triumvirate of Eros, Philia, and Agape. People who exercise governance are such individuals, and are thus obliged to display it daily, which in turn not only causes a sense of self-respect among the population, but more so a sense of communal and national pride. In fact, would one befriend someone or express feeling for something that is not in some ways a source of pride? I will turn next to this issue. Polities themselves must be impressive enough to generate a sense of pride in their citizens and admiration in the eye of allies, and of course even a sense of envy among enemies. For this reason, the prominent twentieth-century thinker and political scientist Hans J. Morgenthau (1904–1980) states unequivocally that states act to maintain their position of power, expand it, or demonstrate it. This last, demonstration, has gained the label of “the politics of prestige.” In this mode, states pursue policies for the sole purpose of increasing their standing and glory. Considering how broadly Morgenthau defines power, this means states that display anything it is something they consider valuable. Morgenthau devotes one chapter of his classic text Politics Among Nations to “the policy of prestige” (1978: 77–91). “Its purpose is to impress” other states or other international actors about the power it “actually possess, or with power it believes, or want others” to believe it has (Ibid.: 78). At the national level, almost all national ceremonies, and at the international level, all diplomatic ceremonies, or military parades, are performed to achieve this. As an ancient example of this, the Athenian political leader Pericles’s famous funeral instructs his fellow citizens to take pride in their polity: “Let me say that our system of government does not copy the institutions of our neighbors. It is more the case of our being a model to others than of our imitating anyone else.” Machiavelli has been called by many names, including “the teacher of evil.” This, I think, is an unduly cursory understanding of his thought. The British political scientist Alan Ryan (b 1940) describes more accurately the aim and the inner logic of the thought of Machiavelli when he subtitled his book on him “the search for glory” (2014). Capturing a new polity or unifying a fractured community for Machiavelli constitutes a glorious act, but more important is to preserve that glory. When a polity loses it, it perishes. As he puts it in his classic The Prince, a political

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leader “will have the double glory of having founded a new realm and adorned it and fortified it with good laws, good arms, good friends and good examples” (Chapter XXIV). The title of this chapter reads, “Why the princes of Italy lost their states,” which identifies negligence in the art of maintaining the glory in the face of changing circumstances as the main cause of lost states. In Machiavelli’s words, “those of our princes who had held their possessions for many years must not accuse fortune for having lost them, but rather their own negligence” (Ibid.). Glory, of course, only comes about through great and exemplary governance, not violence and trickery. As he puts is explicitly: “Nothing makes a prince so much esteemed as great enterprises and setting a fine example… Again, it much assists a prince to give outstanding examples of his greatness in internal affairs” (Ibid.: chapter XXI). These passages directly resemble the governance triumvirate of recognition, friendship, and glory. These three elements need to permeate all spheres of communal life, here the various arenas in the theater, i.e., politics, economy, society, culture, and education. I will turn now to ways in which governance manifests itself in politics.

Politics: Opportunity, Transparency, Uniformity When one of thinks of a polity, the primary functions that come to mind are order, welfare, and fairness, and the public sphere remains the arena of politics, where the public good and the general interest both guide and oversee its functions. These constitute the main task of the state in the literature of political science, but for me these are the minimum that any society requires for survival—the first two for the survival of the citizens and some degree of the latter for the survival of the state. The insightful maxim that many scholars attribute it to the Prophet of Islam is valid everywhere: “a polity will last with unbelief but will not last with injustice.” With order, welfare, and fairness one can create a community, a polity, and even an empire, but to go beyond making a living to produce a civitas, they will not suffice. As discussed before, an orchestra of concomitant, comprehensive, and convivial production should be at work. There is more to note in the political realm, however. Citizens who enjoy a degree of order, welfare, and fairness now expect possibilities of opportunity to make their presence felt; the various collective groups expect transparency about distribution of values; and the public as a whole desires uniform availability of opportunity.

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I argued in Chapter 1 that a simple criterion for recognizing a civitas in any epoch is the direction of human migration. When people migrate, invariably they do so because they feel that the place of destination offers some forms of material opportunity, quality of life, and sense of meaning. For example, note the trend of migration to Canada since the beginning of the nineteenth century. At the turn of that century, immigrants came from Denmark, Poland, Sweden, and Ukraine because they saw opportunity for a better life in land farming. When in Canada, there were more opportunities in the Prairies, so there is a higher concentration of these groups there. During the War of 1812, many soldiers and officers who came from Britain to Canada to participate in the war stayed afterward because they saw more opportunities in Canada. As Canada began to grow, particularly beginning in 1830s, many immigrants came from Finland, Ireland, Russia, and Scotland for opportunities, particularly as forest workers settled in Ontario, Quebec, and British Columbia. In 1845, Irish immigrants fleeing famine came to Canada because of opportunities for a more sustainable life. During the American Civil War of the mid-nineteenth century, the famous Underground Railroad began transporting people of African descent to Canada because of the opportunity for a life of freedom. Moreover, after Confederation in 1867, industrialization and the development of the Canadian Pacific Railway offered opportunities for a better life to yet more settlers. Opportunity is not just a matter of economics; many cultural groups have immigrated to a civitas because of opportunities to live according to their value system or religious creed. Again, in the example of Canada, we might consider the Doukhobors of Russia who began their journey to Canada in 1899. As a group, the Doukhobors are a non-Orthodox ethnoconfessional faith in Russia who sought opportunity outside the Russian empire because of forced-assimilation policies there. Then, there are the Ismaili Muslims who came to Canada in 1972 after Idi Amin (1925– 2003) ordered the expulsion of close to 100,000 citizens of Asian origin from Uganda. The Sikhs have been coming for better opportunities to Canada since the beginning of the twentieth century, but this intensified in the 1960s, and was heightened due to expulsion also from Uganda in 1972. Then, came the Somalis, particularly from 1980–1990 as a result of the policies of Mohamed Siad Barre (1919–1995), whose tenure in office as president is described by the United Nations as follows: “the 21-year regime of Siyad Barre had one of the worst human rights records in Africa” (Human Development Report 2001—Somalia, p. 42). Finally,

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there are the Syrian refugees who came to Canada en masse in 2015. These groups constitute just some examples of religious and cultural minorities who see Canada as a society offering greater opportunities, not just in terms of survival, but also for possibility of achievement and human flourishing. The second aspect of the triumvirate of politics relates to transparency, encompassing openness, communication, and accountability. Structures and institutions of polity should not operate opaquely, without appropriate consultation with the citizens and without accountability. Since the polity is in the business of “the public good,” nothing in it should suggest concealment or conducting affairs without the knowledge of citizens, particularly by the people in power. Even issues that are categorized as “top secret” by the state should in theory, at least, aim to protect the public good; for this reason, they become available as part of the “public records” after a certain period. Thus, the personal and public conduct of those citizens who have undertaken to perform a public task are ultimately open and available to the public. Often even earnings of public employees are made public. For instance, the province of Ontario releases the earnings of all public sector employees earning over $100,000 per year. Education in Canada is public, and so this applies to my own salary as a university professor. Similarly, it is common for citizens who seek public office to reveal their tax records and earnings before and during their tenure in a public post. Transparency practices relate to communication. The polity must communicate, or have in place procedures that guarantee communication of, any information requested by citizens about public affairs in a polity. In other words, the details of the performance of tasks or functions undertaken by any individual or any institution are subject to communication upon request. This explains how in all civilizational contexts, it is the rule of law that serves as the sovereign. Even in civitates based on cosmological or divine presence, the same principle was dominant; it was known as “nomocracy,” literally meaning the rule of law (nomos ). It is worth remembering that the philosophical notion at the heart of those civitates was “the Path” (i.e., the rule of the game), which bore different appellations such as Dharma, Halakha, Maat, and Shari’a, and the sovereign was the guardian of this cosmic order and path. Today in civitates based on a secular worldview, “the rule of law” has proven the surest way to guarantee the supremacy and sovereignty of the people (demos ).

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A warning is in order! “The rule of law” is quite different from “rule by law.” In the past, kings and rulers claimed they themselves were the state; hence their whims were to be accepted as “the rule of law.” Similarly, in modern times some rulers claim to be the embodiment of the nation. We observe the Nazis, for instance, who curtailed personal freedoms, social mobility, and established their dominance through “rule by law.” They based “The Reichstag Fire Decree” (1933) on Article 48, paragraph 2, of the constitution of the German Reich, thus making an iron feast of “the Rule by Law.” Another form of this is the familiar “politics of plebiscite” when the ruler claims to have 99 percent of the people’s vote, as it is very common in “illiberal democracies,” to utilize Fareed Zakaria’s notion (1997). The rule of law works when it is within the parameter of the notions of isonomy and due process, which I discussed in chapter three. In my own profession as an educator, I am bound by the rules and regulations of the country, the province, and the institution to which I offer my services as a public employee. I am directly responsible for my conduct as I deliver my services within the parameters of those rules and regulations, hence the notion of accountability. Rule by law leads to autocracy and despotism, but in disguise because the law becomes instrument of keeping the society of servitude at bay, while the rule of law leads to nomocracy and isonomy. Just as I am answerable to my students in class for the subject matter that I convey as a qualified (I hope!) expert, so does every individual living and working under the structure and organization of the polity who is charged with the responsibility of performing a task. How accountability is guaranteed varies according to the polity and the culture that dominates it. In the new worldview of secular immanence, however, the general notion of separation of powers and checks and balances appears an efficient way to ensure some degree of accountability. Dividing power into legislative, executive, and judicial bodies with mutual oversight, and relying on the media and public opinion as watchdogs, seems to work rather effectively to guarantee some accountability. There are also regular, peaceful, and civil transfers of power through public and transparent elections that communicate the will of the people, who are considered the real sovereign now. These elections also serve as an additional mechanism for safeguarding not only accountability but also openness. The third aspect of the triumvirate in politics relates to uniformity. In a way, uniformity stems directly from the notion of the rule of law,

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whereby every individual and even groups and organizations are theoretically treated uniformly with no partial interference for or against anyone or any group. Ironically, even when traditional hierarchical societies of the past managed to create a civilization, uniformity dominated, albeit in a stratified fashion. The polity treated all members of a given class with uniformity, but distinct from other classes. Here the inner logic of the Platonic notion that the ruling class should refrain from having personal property or family stems from the fear that in assuming public responsibility they may not apply the rule uniformly. Plato’s polity makes sure that the best among the guardians mate with the opposite sex and if the offspring turn out to be the best, they should be raised to take public position, but officials should “prevent anyone from recognizing her own infant” (The Republic: 460d). This way, “the herd of guardians is to be as free as possible from” partiality (Ibid.: 459e). This would guarantee that the guardians not fail in their duty “of degrading the offspring of the guardians when inferior, and of elevating into the rank of guardians the offspring of the lower classes, when naturally superior” (Ibid.: 423c–423d). He also asserts that those who assume positions of guardianship of the city should “not possess houses of their own or land or any other property, but that they should receive from the other citizens for their support the wage of their guardianship and all spend it in common” (Ibid.: 464b–464c). Assuming a public role amounts to abandoning everything private, other than one’s body, for the sake of the public good: in Plato’s words, “nothing in private possession but their bodies, but all else in common” (Ibid.: 464d). In modern accounts of the polity, the solution offered for uniformity has been termed by Hannah Arendt as “isonomy” and by Charles Taylor as “the horizontal or direct access society.” I discussed these notions in the previous chapter when elaborating the nuances of the rule of the game, the social imaginary, or, in my preferred term, ethos. Here, I consider these as practical measures ensuring the functioning of the polity. Both philosophers are aware that the very notion of “natural equality” runs counter to the fact of individuality and uniqueness of human beings, even when we belong to the same species. Arendt reminds us that human plurality “has the twofold character of equality and distinction” (1958: 175), a seeming paradox. The cosmological worldview solved this paradox by defining justice as everything and everyone occupying their proper places in society in a hierarchical social stratification. The secular worldview claims to have solved the paradox by defining justice as fairness and

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equality in a horizontal social stratification. The following passage from Arendt captures the meaning of modern fairness and equality: The equality attending the public realm is necessarily an equality of unequals who stand in need of being “equalized” in certain respects and for specific purposes. As such, the equalizing factor arises not from human “nature” but from outside, just as money—to continue the Aristotelian example—is needed as an outside factor to equate the unequal activities of physician and farmer. (Ibid.: 215)

The role of money in the economy resembles the functioning of isonomy in the Arendtian public sphere and the horizontal condition of civitas based on modernity, according to Taylor. In fact, the latter thinks it is a completely new notion and very different from traditional moral order: The principle of a modern horizontal society is radically different. Each of us is equidistant from the center; we are immediate to the whole. This describes what we could call a direct-access society. We have moved from a hierarchical order of personalized links to an impersonal egalitarian one; from a vertical world of mediated access to horizontal, direct access societies. (2004: 158)

Both isonomy and horizontal society work uniformly for everyone, regardless of race, gender, culture, ethnicity, and/or idiosyncratic tendencies. That is, the universal application of rules and regulations makes possible a condition of immediacy at the center of decision-making. All citizens, regardless of position and social rank, would experience the same procedure, whether they apply for a passport or a building permit, vote in elections, or pay taxes. It is important to note that the same procedures of uniformity repeat themselves in other spheres such as the economy, which we turn to next.

Economy: Imagination, Cooperation, Compassion Today, three modes that have produced material life in the past—agriculture, industry, and information—serve to provide the subsistence that makes possible human survival, and to generate property, wealth, and capital. Not only the modes of production but also the mechanisms for its protection, distribution, and regeneration, constitute the economic aspect of theater. Adam Smith’s (1723–1790) The Wealth of Nations

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(first published in 1776) grasped the essence of the economy as an arena where wealth is produced, distributed, and maintained in such a way that today is conveyed by the phrase “sustainable development.” After the publication of The Wealth of Nations, Smith comprehensively revised his earlier book The Theory of Moral Sentiments, taking the position that the economy should never take precedence over moral concerns, and indeed underscoring his view of the economy as a sub-branch of moral philosophy. The fact that he left his substantial estate to the poor demonstrates that he did not just talk but also lived according to the principles he advanced. Indeed, the breadth and sophistication of Smith’s philosophy both reminds and warns us that economic thinking cannot and should not be separated from moral considerations and decisions. What is more, the guardian of such moral decisions is not an outside institution but the “impartial spectator” for human beings and their actions (2004: passim). For this reason, the ends and functions of the economy are not maximization of gain, annual growth, or mass production. As shown in chapter three, ethos or the social imaginary in any society sets the parameters of the moral framework. The main functions of the economy, however, relate to the encouragement of imagination, cooperation, and healthy competition. The polity and its structures and institutions thus bear responsibility for the right and proper working of the three layers of production, distribution, and regeneration. I should point out again, however, that my view of the economy, à la Aristotle, is that it is the private sphere for the utilization of human activity of work by means of human instrumental rationality. It ultimately focuses on maximization of gain, and hence needs oversight and regulation. I therefore agree with and support Polanyi’s assertion that notions of a “self-regulating market” or the famous “invisible hand” are simply fictions or, in post-modern language, a “construction” masquerading as truth about the nature of human beings and their social reality. Polanyi’s following bold statement is valid for humans throughout history except a brief period in nineteenth-century Europe: “The economic system is, in effect, a mere function of social organization” (1994: 52). This does not mean the economy is not important, but it is not the case that, as the popular phrase in recent American political culture put it: “It’s the economy, stupid.” In the words of Polanyi:

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No society could, naturally, live for any length of time unless it possessed an economy of some sort; but previously to our time no economy has ever existed that, even in principle, was controlled by markets…. [G]ain and profit made on exchange never before [the nineteenth century] played an important part in human economy. (Ibid.: 45)

What we see is that the ethos of the polity decides the fate and the direction of economic activities. Marx’s collaborator and fellow Communist, the German philosopher and businessperson Frederick Engels (1820–1895) registered this in his comparison of the American and Canadian economies. He attributed the backwardness of the Canadian economy in comparison to the American economy to the value system regulating it. “It is a strange transition from the States to Canada…. Here one sees how necessary the feverish speculative spirit of the Americans is for the rapid development of a new country” (Marx and Engels 1953: 204). While the ethos determines the direction, the economic structures and institutions implement that direction, since they are to be at the service of the good and the public welfare. The civitas plays an important role in this as a destination for opportunities, an attractive location for individuals with imagination, new ideas, and dreams. The Italian-American singer Frank Sinatra (1915–1998) sang it thus: “What is America to me; A name, a map, or a flag I see; A certain word, democracy; … The things I see about me; the big things and the small.” The American poet and songwriter Abel Meeropol (1903– 1986) wrote the lyrics to this song. He imagined the whole of society contributing to the fate and direction of his community. In line with this, we see that the very first function of the polity is to initiate ways and means that could empower and encourage people to imagine things that did not exist before. Measures such as “property rights,” “copyright laws,” “patent office,” “rights to privacy,” and “intellectual property,” are formal and theoretical frameworks that offer protection for imaginations. For example, as a Federal Agency in the Department of Commerce and with 12,579 employees (as of September 2018), the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) is in charge of keeping records for the protection of the rights of anyone who has imagined and innovated something new and useful. The US constitution authorized its formation to “promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries” (Article I, Section 8, Clause 8). Apparently, this

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agency registers more that 150,000 new patents every year. Many societies incorporate celebratory mechanisms running the gamut from “employee of the month” to the internationally most important recognition, the Nobel Prizes, to encourage imagination and innovation. The second responsibility of the economic aspect of the theater relates to encouraging cooperation among groups. Ironically, this can extend to limiting some negative freedoms of businesses to prevent unfair competition. For example, regulations governing business licenses and price control limit some negative freedom. Further, there are social regulations that affect the way individuals or firms conduct their business, such as anti-trust law. On the other hand, subsidies for farmers or other segments of industry act as a guarantee of affirmative freedom. Cooperation can exist at the international level too. On its official webpage, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) defines regulations as the “imposition of rules by government, backed by the use of penalties that are intended specifically to modify the economic behaviour of individuals and firms in the private sector.” One should note that this modification of economic behavior acts as a double-edged sword. It may limit economic competition and unrestricted exploitation, but it enhances fairness and ensures a more equitable distribution of goods and services. At the same time, not all political groups favor limitations. In the American and Canadian contexts, for examples, there is an obvious rift between the attitude and the policies of Democrats and Liberals on the one hand, who favor more a planned and regulated economy, and Republicans and Conservatives on the other hand, who favor a more laissez-faire economy. The third function of the economic theater is to encourage “corporate social responsibility.” This goes beyond rules and regulations enforceable by punishment. The economic theater of a civitas must act in such a way as to encourage self-regulating businesses and business models, so that economic actors exercise social accountability, first toward themselves, then stakeholders, and finally but most importantly, the public. The fact that the tax system in the contemporary civitas collectively known as “the West” offers many tax breaks for philanthropic activities has proved effective in turning many companies to socially charitable works. Companies do this by making the four keyways of thinking, doing, and practicing part of their corporate culture: philanthropy, ethical labor practices, volunteering, and urgently, due to climate change, environmentally sensitive behavior. When I was conducting research in the Rockefeller

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Foundation’s Archives in upstate New York for the book I was writing on the thought and practices of Kenneth W. Thompson (Rajaee 2013), who was an executive of the foundation for decades, I was amazed at the extent of the work that the Rockefellers did for the well-being of humanity, ranging from material contributions to the construction of hospitals and universities to support for the humanities, arts, literature, and the human imagination. I hope the reader notes that in the process of civilization production, the economy extends far beyond simply facilitating the process of “making a living.” As mentioned in the introduction, presence and playing human relate to making a life worth narrating for the posterity; hence I have allowed for the sustenance production side of the economy to remain the prerogative of the economists. For me, however, its function in encouraging imagination, cooperation, and compassion are much more significant and enduring. These functions always happen within a societal context that is conducive to them, and that is my next topic.

Society: Individuality, Collectivity, Commonality The discipline of sociology concentrates on the collective behavior of people and dominates discourse that seeks to understand society and the way social structures and institutions functions. My interest is in social spaces that contribute to the flourishing of the political that makes playing human and having presence possible. I take issue with a concentration on behavior alone because what is fascinating about human beings relates to their uniqueness and the spontaneity of human imagination, plus the fact that each human has no equal. For me, society contributes to the manifestation of presence through the societal perception of selves in their roles as individuals, as members of their preferred collectivity, and above all as part of the polity to which they have primary loyalty in connection to or in relation with humanity the world over. A society contributing to human presence and the production of civitas facilitates and enhances the emergence and the manifestation of human uniqueness. Society opens and offers spaces and arenas in the theater for this uniqueness. It is no surprise that the Scottish philosopher Adam Ferguson (1723–1816) made the following observation: “It is in conducting the affairs of civil society that mankind finds the existence of the best talents, as well as the object of their best affection” (1991: 155). At the level of the individual, society encourages individuality; at the group level, it encourages collectivity, and

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for the totality of the polity or even humanity it fosters and supports commonality. At the individual level, John Locke speaks of the rights to “life, liberty and property” as a sure way to ensure human beings’ ability to negotiate demands and constraints in the political to facilitate presence. These are key notions and should not be taken lightly or as obvious. I will call upon Locke himself to shed some light. Note the following: “Man had in himself the great foundation for ownership—namely his being master of himself, and owner of his own person and of the actions or work done by it” (Second Treatises, Chapter 5: 44). Or his argument that everyone has “a right of freedom to his person; no-one else has any power over this—it is entirely his to use as he wishes” (Ibid.: Chapter 16: 190). In terms of liberty, according to Locke, “man was born with a right to perfect freedom” (Ibid.: Chapter 7: 87). As a corollary, “the labour of his body and the work of his hands, we may say, are strictly his” (Ibid.: Chapter 5: 27). Not only human beings have natural rights of life, liberty, and property, but they have the authority and responsibility to preserve and protect them. In his words: So he [the individual] has by nature a power not only to preserve his property, that is, his life, liberty and possessions, against harm from other men, but to judge and punish breaches of the law of nature by others— punishing in the manner he thinks the offence deserves, even punishing with death crimes that he thinks are so dreadful as to deserve it. (Ibid.: Chapter 7: 87)

I have chosen John Locke because his explicit and well-argued position has proven the clearest and the most influential in contemporary understanding of the human condition and its socio-political manifestation. I could have easily offered an account of human individuality in any other civitas in human history. For example, I could have narrated the human condition in the sacred text of the most influential religious tradition in ancient Persia, i.e., Zoroastrianism, which I will deal with in the second part of this book. Suffice it to say here that human beings are individually responsible for choosing the path of light for integrity, achievements, and flourishing over the path to darkness and failure. Similarly, I could have relied on the Platonic account of the human condition, particularly in his dialogue Symposium, where he depicts human being as standing “in between” (metaxy). In his words: “For wisdom has to do with the

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fairest things, and Love is a love directed to what is fair; so that Love must needs be a friend of wisdom, and, as such, must be between wise and ignorant” (Symposium: 204b). Each one of these traditions, including Locke’s account, implies that human beings need to enhance their inner urges, whether called “love” as in Plato, or rights as in Locke, or duty as in Zoroastrianism. Locke summarized them as rights of life, property, and liberty, but I have slightly changed the order so that they correspond to the three dimensions of being human, body/heart, mind, and soul. Societal theater can enhance the protection of individuality by protecting all three. Note how negative freedom enhances the right to life, as discussed before. With regards to the present discussion, one could refer to the rights to be left alone, to privacy, to freedom of speech, to freedom of association, and to freedom of conscience as notable examples. Some readers may think of these rights as novel or the invention of modernity, but, as an example, privacy in form of the safe and sacred nature of one’s private dwelling has been part of humanity’s history from time immemorial. Affirmative freedom safeguards and upholds the right of property and possession. The old ways of registering property and transactions with churches and now documenting them under the mechanism of “title” are clear examples. The way the transfer of wealth and property to subsequent generations has been managed through inheritance in common law practices or in the modern times through the legal system offers another example. And of course, in recent times, intellectual property and copyright laws have extended the right of property to abstract areas of art and human imagination. The possibility of assertive freedom proves the surest way of guaranteeing liberty, which ironically can only happen in the presence of others. Utilizing negative and affirmative forms of freedom, people have asserted themselves individually or collectively to manifest individuality and uniqueness. Prominent examples of this in the contemporary world are the movements in support of rights for women, racial and ethnic and religious minority groups, and the LGBTQ community. Recently, movements such as Black Lives Matter and “Me Too” have emerged. The latter has shockingly revealed that in the United States, a civilized society built purely on the promises of Lockean notions of right-bearing individuals (as will be discussed in chapter seven), 54% of American women have reported suffering “unwanted and inappropriate” sexual advances. Moreover, 95% of them maintain that such behavior usually goes unaddressed or unpunished (Fortune: October 17, 2017). Once again, it should be

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emphasized that negative and affirmative freedom are important to give assurance and encouragement for the individual to dare to assert its individuality. Societal theater must encourage collectivity also because an individual cannot achieve all their needs and aspirations alone. How is this done? The common understanding and the dominant vernacular speak of creating equal opportunity through mechanisms such as the Arendtian notion of isonomy or Taylor’s notion of horizontal society, which I already spoke about earlier in this chapter and in chapter three. Ethos or the rule of the game expects the paradox of the feeling of equality and yet recognition and appreciation of individuality. Absolute equality assumes sameness of all human beings, and hence ignores the uniqueness of individuals. On the other hand, if one takes the uniqueness of the individual too far, then any general rule would be impossible to establish or enforce. In some ways, there are aspects of being human that exist in everyone the same way, hence the notion of equality. In Arendt’s words: If men were not equal, they could neither understand each other and those who came before them nor plan for the future and foresee the needs of those who will come after them. If men were not distinct, each human being distinguished from any other who is, was, or will ever be, they would need neither speech nor action to make themselves understood. (1958: 175–176)

As mentioned before, to bring these two apparently contradictory positions, isonomy, or a sense of assuming equality, works wonders. Also, since “society always demands that its members act as though they were members of one enormous family which has only one opinion and one interest” (Ibid.: 39), the societal theater should formulate mechanisms that ensure that each member is treated as though they are equal and also implements procedures that convey an absolute sense of equality. Finally, societal structures and institutions should enhance and encourage commonality by offering a space where members of the society come together freely “to discuss matters of common interest; and thus, to be able to form a common mind about these” (Taylor 2004: 83). It is a space where one feels secure, energized, and filled with pride to appear before others. It is where the powerful potential of humanity becomes real. This is the potential that keeps civilization alive (Arendt 1958: 199– 200). It is a space where everyone has a sense of belonging and yet not of

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being judged or blamed, where one feels secure as to Audete vos Liberare (Dare to be Free). If anything, people serve as each other’s mirrors and interlocutors wherever actual human presence takes place and the political occurs par-excellence. And this commonality exists as something common among the people. In Arendt’s words: “Its peculiarity is that, unlike the spaces which are the work of our hands, it does not survive the actuality of the movement which brought it into being but disappears … with the dispersal of men” (Ibid.: 199). In all three aspects, societal structures, and institutions function by making it possible for people to be “who” they are. According to Arendt, the Athenian society presents such a polity where “men could show who they really and unexchangeable were” (Ibid.: 41). Such a possibility had enormous benefit for the polis in that it made them better citizens. As Arendt continues, “It was for the sake of this chance, and out of love for a body politic that made it possible to them all, that each was more or less willing to share in the burden of jurisdiction, defense, and administration of public affairs” (Ibid.). Theater sets the stage for appearance, self-revelation, remembrance, interaction with others, as well as with reality. This happens when a sense of community is generated. A community is either the actual or imaginative “web of human relationships” (Ibid.: 183), and not a system where people must in Michel Foucault’s (1926–1984) words follow a “system of command” (1995:166). Societal structures and institutions that encourage individuality, collectivity, and commonality perform this function well. They empower the individual, the collective, and the general public, and this combination generates a culture of civitas, which requires an appropriate cultural theater.

Culture: Family, State, the World Cultural structures and institutions have always had a major presence in the working of the theater. As mentioned before, they accentuate, they put emphasis, or tolerate certain aspects of the ethos, and they also are affected and influenced by it. As an example, as an outsider and hopefully a participant observer, I have experience for more than a decade of living in each of two closely similar societies, the United States and Canada. The resemblance relates to intensive participation in the civilization of modernity, but closer observation of the two societies reveals a striking contrast between the cultures and hence the cultural context of the two societies. The American sociologist Seymore Martin Lipset (1922–2006)

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showed this contrast in his book The Continental Divide; the Values and Institutions of the United States and Canada (1990). He begins the book with the following assertion: “The United States is the country of the revolution, Canada of the counterrevolution” (1990: 1). Then he moves on to argue that this feature permeates all aspects of life in both cultures, from ideology, identity, literature, myth, religion, legal system, economy, governance, social stratification, and so on. The reason for these contrasts may lie in what some scientists have called “collective learning,” which while general in many respects are very specific in some other respects. Here, I am insisting on the general teaching of cultural structures and institutions, regardless of specific context. The contrasts between them notwithstanding, all cultural structures and institutions encourage a sense of responsible belonging in the three aspects of the societal theater: the family, the state, and the world. To elaborate on this, I will return to work of the philosopher of history Ibn Khaldun and his understanding of the rise and fall of civilization in his magnum opus on the notion of Asabiyah. This concept grasps precisely what I want to convey. He means by it a sense of motivated, energized, focused, and conscious belonging, accompanied by a powerful urge for unity and social cohesion. Ibn Khaldun’s main translator into English offers two renderings in his work: “group feeling” and “group spirit” (Khaldun 1958). This conveys a sense of inner confidence and pride regarding the group, the community, or fellow human beings that motivates one to act positively. Having a strong Asabiyah leads to empathy. According to Ibn Khaldun, any attempt to form any societal unit, family, tribe, urban dwelling, state, or even religious community begins with Asabiyah. Similarly, the maintenance of groups requires it and when they weaken, it is because of an erosion of it. In his words, any societal “undertaking by necessity requires group feeling” (Ibid.: I: 322). To apply this to religious movements, he invokes the following tradition in Islam: “God sends no prophet who did not enjoy the protection of his people.” Immediately Ibn Khaldun adds, “if this was the case with the prophets, who are among human beings those most likely to perform wonders” (Ibid.). Any culture concerned with playing human encourages this feeling at the three levels suggested. Solidarity and cohesion elevate unity in the family, the state, and the world, because the three are not mutually exclusive. Strong family solidarity leads to strong states and strong states contribute to the betterment and enhancement of human greatness, here for my purpose civility and civilization building. One may wrongly assume that this runs

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contrary to the local focus of all cultures. How do the two relate to one another? I do not think they are mutually exclusive. Local solidarity is not contrary to the global solidarity, but rather is another layer of it; in the final analysis, the “other” serves as a mirror to help one self-reflection and more often a good model to emulate or avoid. The “we” feeling that includes the “other” is always sounder, stronger, more constructive, and more lasting than the binary xenophobic sense of “us vs. them,” the minimum harm of it, is constant state of panic and anxiety. The British sociologist Roland Robertson (b. 1938) is accurate when he suggests, in my paraphrasing of his view, that globalization means localization of the global and globalization of the local. I add that dynamic and strong individuals and units can achieve this paradox. In his words: “We may best consider contemporary globalization in its most general sense as a form of institutionalization of the two-fold process involving the universalization of particularism and the particularization of universalism” (1992: 102). Another layer of the notion of Asabiyah conveys this paradox of particular/universal sense of belonging. In this sense, it is comparable to the notion of civic republicanism or civil humanism in the Western tradition, as elaborated upon by Aristotle, the Greek historian, Polybios (c208–c125 BCE), the Roman statesman, jurist, and philosopher, Marcus Tullius Cicero, Niccolò Machiavelli, particularly in his work The Discourses on Livy, the English philosopher John Locke, the Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico (1688–1744), the French philosophers Charles-Louis Montesquieu (1689–1755) and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and most notably in the collective thoughts of the Founding Fathers of the American Republic. No wonder the American experience, recent xenophobia notwithstanding, has proven the most transparent, open, welcoming, and inclusive in human history. Family, the state, and the world constitute three major societal units for the individual with presence. Two major forms of the family, i.e., extended, and nuclear, have dominated world history. Cultural and social location, however, have determined who is included, the intensity of the ties among members, the legal meaning of the role of each member, and the consequences of each role. At the same time, redaction regularly takes place in cultural categories and rules. Recent moves in developing societies in Europe and North America to legalize same-sex marriage are a major case in point. Even in concurring societies or ones on holiday from history there are movements along the same line; for example,

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in the more restricted society of the Islamic republic of Iran, cohabitation without marriage, known as “white marriage,” happens regularly. A women’s magazine was closed in 2015 for the crime of encouraging this “illegal and corrupt” form of marriage, but the fact that later it was allowed to resume publication points to an interesting tacit recognition of this major societal change and redaction in the ethos and social imaginary in Iran. One could consider the conservative voices in their opposition to such a radical move and redaction as a sign of respect and reverence for the family and its major role within the polity. Indeed, the first task of societal structure and institutions relates to how much they create space in the social theater for the individual to create immediate commitment to the smallest and the most vital communal unit, the family. To play human, personal desires, wants, and ideals must be safeguarded and enhanced. For me, the immigration policy of sponsoring spouses and members of the immediate family in immigrant-friendly states are important signs of support for such tasks. Support for adoption and the provision of parental leaves for both parents are also important indicators. The next layer relates to the sense of Asabiyah toward the polity, often expressed as patriotism. I think the English novelist and essayist George Orwell (Eric Arthur Blaire, 1903–1950) offers the clearest definition of it in his essay “Noes on Nationalism,” in the following passage: By ‘patriotism’ I mean devotion to a particular place and a particular way of life, which one believes to be the best in the world but has no wish to force on other people. Patriotism is of its nature defensive, both militarily and culturally. Nationalism, on the other hand, is inseparable from the desire for power. The abiding purpose of every nationalist is to secure more power and more prestige, not for himself but for the nation or other unit in which he has chosen to sink his own individuality. (2002: 865)

His comparison of patriotism with nationalism is pointed, insightful, and informative. The cultural structures and institutions of a developing, dynamic, and civilized context encourage its member to swim and not sink. Also, there is an awareness that power remains with the dynamism of members actively engaged with one another and if force is used it is for the necessity of defense, always and only. The final layer relates to some sense of solidarity with the whole world, including the physical theater, which as discussed before constitutes the

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only proven natural condition that allows human beings to make a living without the help of artificial gadgets, and to make a life. I spoke of the ideas of the Austrian-Israeli theologian, Martin Buber, who in his classic work I and Thou invites humanity to be conscious of the unity of existence and behave as such when one faces fellow human beings and the totality of the lifeworld. Concern and care for humanity manifests itself in variety of forms, from philanthropy to official state policies of foreign aid. The criticism of radical disclaimers of both leftist and rightist minority voices aside, formal policies and international agencies devoted in today’s world to aid vulnerable peoples the world over set examples of good Samaritans in any civitas. And now, private initiatives and public strategies fighting climate change focus not only on addressing an immediate need, but the needs of future generations.

Education: Perception, Knowledge, Authenticity All human units require socialization: even those focusing on conquest and even those that are on holiday from history need some degree of socialization for their very survival. Education constitutes an intrinsic part of this. One of the oldest texts in the Western tradition pointing to the importance and the role of education is the Platonic dialogue entitled Alcibiades I . It depicts the conversation between Socrates and the young Alcibiades (c450–404 BCE) about the significance of education to fight humanity’s great enemy, ignorance. To convince his young interlocutor, Socrates describes the function of education in Persia, which was the center of civility and civilization production (see Chapter 5 of the present work). The following passage from Socrates is informative and insightful: When the boys are seven years old, they are given horses and have riding lessons, and they begin to follow the chase. And when the boy reaches fourteen years he is taken over by the royal tutors, as they call them there: these are four men chosen as the most highly esteemed among the Persians of mature age, namely, the wisest one, the most just one, the most temperate one, and the bravest one. (Alcibiades I : 121e–122a)

These four masters impart on the new citizens’ nurture and education, Socrates continues, (Ibid.: 122b). But why do we need education and what does it entail?

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Kant offers a convincing reason as follows: “Man must develop his tendency towards the good. Providence has not placed goodness ready formed in him, but merely as a tendency and without the distinction of moral law” (1900: 11). For this reason, he has rightly reminded us that “Man is the only being who needs education. For by education we must understand nurture (the tending and feeding of the child), discipline (Zucht), and teaching, together with culture” (Ibid.: 1). These two statements by Kant offer good answers to my two-part question and more. All societies need to socialize their members toward “the good” they have set as their ideals. Human beings have the potential to be socialized. Education offers efficient tools and procedures to foster socialization by imparting in Kant’s words, “discipline, teaching and culture.” I use the triumvirate of “Perception, Knowledge, Authenticity” to designate the same three aspects. Going back to the passage form Alcibiades above, the wisest educator helps novices hold on to their hearts, the most temperate and the bravest nurture their minds, and the most just one guide their souls. In what follows I will elaborate on each briefly. By perception, I mean a way of seeing, an approach, and an attitude, that considers the propriety of the things an essential part of education for the materialization or enhancement of the good. Is it useful? Does it provide immediate and connected service to its time and place? I will use the modern university system as an example. No one should doubt the value and significance of the universities in the abstract. History has witnessed the emergence of several newly independent states since the 1960s, and many charitable foundations in the West have contributed to the creation and institutionalization of universities in these countries. A cursory review of their product—that is, university graduates—in most of the so-called under-developed countries (or in my parlance, countries busy with conquests or on holiday from history) shows that most of their graduates have gone on to live and work in the so-called developed, or in my language “developing” regions such as in Western Europe, North America, Australia, New Zealand, and others. Proper perception inculcates accurate sense of relevance and belonging, whereas the education of these graduate does not serve the native interest, but the good defined by the elite of developing countries of advanced economic stated. The Palestinian-American Edward Said (1935–2003), argued forcefully how the educational enterprise known as “orientalism” gives not only a wrong perception of the non-west, but more tragically the people of the orient perceive and understand themselves through of this construct (1978).

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I do not have to go very far to see evidence of this: I present myself as an example. While I did three-quarters of my studies in Iran, I have lived and work most of my professional life in the West. Perception in Rumi’s words, means “seeing the path,” i.e., figuring out the utility of the subject, but in the Aristotelian notion of “telos,” where something is fully “in action:” “If the earth is filled with perfume and sweetness till the eternity—when there is no seeing the path in man, it is of no utility” (Sonnet 389: 4). The said universities are such “perfume and sweetness.” I do need to dwell on the notion of knowledge further. Knowledge relates to the body of information, data, analysis, interpretation, theory, and operations about the subject matter at hand, both historically and at present. Pragmatism, under the rubric of experiment, intersubjective testability, proof, and certainty has become a central criterion for establishing knowledge. When the French philosopher Denis Diderot (1713–1784) launched his general encyclopedia, he aimed to bring all knowledge into one place so that everyone could access it. Later became the idea of modern and more often public university or the idea of public library with open access and transparency. The bourgeoning of the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, and the general success of modernity made the idea of infinite progress, “the law of the human species” in Arendt’s words (1982: 77). This consisted of a misconception that led to “progress” becoming the religion of our time. Knowledge is the only reliable truth: it is objective, universally valid, and easily transported from place to place. In the context of the discussion here, however, knowledge declared autonomy from perception and its utility lost the Aristotelian sense of telos, hence becoming nothing but a means of mastery over people and nature; everything and everyone became resources. As mentioned before, in Buber’s word, all became “it” or in Heidegger’s phrase “standing-reserve”: those who elevate knowledge without its constructive tension with perception “approach nature as an object of research, until even the object disappears into the objectlessness of standing-reserve” (1937: 19). When knowledge functions in direct connection with perception, that sets the direction, the focus, and the path, without seeing the world as resource and instrument, it also saves itself from becoming an instrument of manipulation. The great Iranian mystic Abu-Majd ibn Adam Sanaei Ghaznavi (1080–1140) warns with conviction that one must be wary of the sense of power and self-righteousness that knowledge causes and generates. As he puts it: “When you gain knowledge, be forewarns of

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temptation in the heat of the night –A thief becomes choosy, when he comes with light” (1388/2009: 61). It is interesting to note that while the exaggerated from of modernity I have called “Modernism” separates perception and knowledge, so has the exaggerated form of religiosity that I have called “Islamism” (Rajaee 2007). Charles Taylor offered his CBC Massey Lectures Authenticity of 1991 under the title of “The Malaise of Modernity,” later published by Harvard as The Ethics of Authenticity (1992). By authenticity, he means the conviction of an individual to be above all true to one’s self. As discussed in chapter two, this is not self-absorption, but entails an openness to “horizons of significance.” In his words, “authenticity can’t be defended in ways that collapse horizons of significance” (1992: 38–39). These horizons relate to the larger contexts within which humans live and make a living. This point is very significant because if one does not stand guard, quantity takes over. Taylor approvingly cites the following statement from the American philosopher Alan Bloom (1930–1992) to show how our horizons have become smaller: “Survivalism has taken the place of heroism as the admired quality” (cited in Ibid.: 16). Bloom’s book (1987) was a detailed criticism of state of higher education in the United States, on the one hand, and a strenuous defense of liberal education for socialization, on the other. The basic message relates to how quantity and the logic of positivistic sciences have dominated at the price of undermining or ignoring humanizing, ethical, and public issues, horizons that include reverence, empathy, and benevolence toward others, the natural world, and the totality of the human lifeworld. Allan Bloom considers the main mission of education “to fulfill human nature against all the deforming forces of convention and prejudice” (1987: 20). From the early days of the 1979 revolution, Iran, under the rubric of authenticity and fighting Modernism, has made a sharp distinction between “commitment (Taahod) and knowhow (Takhassos ),” which resemble the two concepts of knowledge and authenticity. Bloom’s claim was that modern educational systems give students expertise and knowledge but empty them of any commitment to the native soil and culture. I recall radical revolutionaries proclaiming that modern educational institutions produce graduates with the “heart of an infidel and we want to reverse that.” Accordingly, they succeeded in closing the universities for the duration of the “cultural revolution” that lasted for 30 months (1980–1982). This was as disastrous as the separation between perception and knowledge in the modernist narrative in the complex process

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of modernity. Under the guise of the objectivity of modern knowledge, “instead of observing natural phenomena as they were given to him, [the modern observer] placed nature under the conditions of his own mind” (Arendt 1958: 265). In a similar way, instead of fostering the difficult condition of a conversation between authenticity and knowledge, the Islamists cast knowledge as insignificant and placed it under the conditions of nativism, and in the end classified it as irrelevant. In the end socialization and education has no short cut, but demands the working of perception, knowledge, and authenticity in concert, even if accompanied with constructive tension. The main function of the educational theater is to inspire such a concert. By way of conclusion for this section, I would offer this insightful comment from the American aphorist, author, and educator William Arthur Ward (1921–1994): “The mediocre teacher tells. The good teacher explains. The superior teacher demonstrates. The great teacher inspires” (1968: 16). One could replace the figure of the teacher with the educational structures and institutions of the theater. When they do their job of offering proper perception, knowledge, and authenticity, they have in fact achieved all these: telling, explaining, demonstrating, and inspiring. ∗ ∗ ∗ The contribution of the theater as the third paragon of presence, performing human and civility functions in conformity with presence and ethos. There is a cohesion the runs through all three: the mental dispositions that comprise presence capture the harmonic functioning of the heart/body, the mind, and the soul. In turn, presence functions harmonically with the various components of ethos that emanate from the heart, the mind, and the soul. And both presence and ethos require an external arena that allows individuals to appear to themselves, to each other as groups, and to the entirety of existence (those who appeared before and are represented by history and those who will appear later, whom we call posterity). The table below captures such a world, summarizing the parts that I outlined above: The Macrocosm-the Polity (Theater)

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Categories

Governance Politics Economy Society Culture Education

Spheres Passion (sense/heart)

Intellect (mind)

Spirit (soul)

Recognition Opportunity Imagination Individuality Family Perception

Friendship Transparency Cooperation Collectivity Polity Knowledge

Reverence/Glory Uniformity Compassion Commonality The world Authenticity

Sources Cited Arendt, Hannah. 1958. The Human Condition. Chicago: Chicago University Press. ———. 1982. Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy. Edited and with an Interpretive Essay by Ronald Beiner. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Bloom, Allan. 1987. The Closing of the American Mind. New York: Simon and Schuster. Churchill, Winston. 1947. “On democracy.” British Parliamentary Debates (11 November): 203– 209. Ferguson, Adam. 1991. An Essay on the History of Civil Society. With a new introduction by Louis Schneider. London: Transaction Publisher, second printing. Human Development Report: Making New Technologies Work for Human Development (2001). New York: United Nations Development Program (UNDP). Hume, David. 2007. A Dissertation on the Passions [and] the Natural History of Religion. Edited by Tom L. Beauchamp. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Ibn Khaldun. 1958. The Muqaddimah; An Introduction to History. Translated from the Arabic by Franz Rosenthal. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 3 volumes. Kant, Immanuel. 1900. Kant on Education (Ueber Padagogik). Translated by Annette Churton. Boston: D. C. Heath, and Co., Publishers. Kantorowicz, Ernst. 1957. The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Lipset, Seymour Martin. 1996. American Exceptionalism; A Double -Edged Sword. New York: W. W. Norton and Company. Marx, Karl, and Frederick Engels. 1953. Letters to Americans; 1848–1895, A Selection. New York: International Publishers.

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Mill, John Stuart. 2008. On Liberty, Utilitarianism and Other Essays. Edited with an Introduction and Notes by John Gray. Oxford: Oxford University Press, new printing. Morgenthau, Hans J. 1978. Politics Among Nations; Struggle for Power and Peace, 5th ed. New York: Knopf. Orwell, George. 2002. Essays. Selected and introduced by John Carey. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, first edition 1968. Polanyi, Karl. 1994. The Great Transformation; the Political and Economic Origins of our Time. New York: Beacon Press, first edition 1944. Rajaee, Farhang. 2007. Islamism and Modernism; The Changing Discourses in Iran. Austin: The University of Texas Press. ———. 2013. Kenneth W . Thompson, the Prophet of. Norms: Thought and Practice. New York: Palgrave MacMillan. Robertson, Roland. 1992. Globalization: Social Theory and Global Culture. London: Sage. Said, Edward. 1978. Orientalism. New York: Vintage. Taylor, Charles. 2003. The Ethics of Authenticity. Toronto: Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, 11th printing. ———. 2004. Modern Social Imaginaries. Durham: Duke University Press. Thompson, Kenneth W. 1975. Understanding World Politics. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press. Ward, William Arthur. 1968. Thoughts of a Christian Optimist; the Words of William Arthur Ward. Indianapolis: Droke House. Zakaria, Farid. 1997. “The Rise of Illiberal Democracy. Foreign Affairs 76 (November–December): 6.

PART II

Praxis, Civitates in History

CHAPTER 5

The Persians: a Civitas of Divine-Immanence

You cannot be buried in obscurity: you are exposed upon a grand theatre to the view of the world. If your actions are upright and benevolent, be assured they will augment your power and happiness. Cyrus the Great

For my first discussion of a civitas that facilitates presence and displays the political, I will be using the example of civitas that is grounded in a worldview of wholeness and a sense of holiness toward the totality of existence. The worldview of these civitates has also been referred to as cosmological, in that their ideal polity is the mirror image of the cosmos (Frankfort et al. 1977), but since the cosmos was considered divine, I think the phrase “divine-immanence” better describes this worldview, because in this framework divinity should emanate from everything, in that all beings and actions should reflect the divine: otherwise they would not be legitimate. There are many historical examples that could serve as the focus of this chapter, such as the civilizations of ancient India, ancient China, and the first nations of the American continents, but I have chosen the Achaemenids of Iran (550–330 BCE). I have made this decision not only for the practical reason that I have deep prior knowledge of the Achaemenids, having studied the records of that epoch when working on my other publication on the political thought of the ancient East (1389/2000), but more importantly because I was struck by the © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 F. Rajaee, Presence and the Political, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59487-9_5

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following observation from the German philosopher Georg Hegel (1770– 1831) about the civitas of this dynasty in Iran: “The principle of development begins with the history of Persia. This, therefore, constitutes strictly the beginning of World-History” (2001: 192). My reading of this passage tells me that in Hegel’s view, the Persians created not just an impressive empire, but the first universally appealing civitas; hence, I wanted to explore this case further. A recent study of the same period by Bruce Lincoln (b. 1948), professor of religions at the University of Chicago, depicts the Achaemenids’ civitas as “the world’s largest, richest, most powerful, most splendid, and most glorious” (2012: 478). At the zenith of its power, the Achaemenids extended from Eastern Europe and the Balkans in the West, to the Indus Valley in the East, to the Caspian Sea and the border of Uzbekistan and Aral Sea in the North, and to the Persian Gulf, Yemen, and southern Egypt in the South, spanning 5.5 million square kilometers (2,123,652 square miles). In terms of power and influence, the Achaemenids affected the Maurya of India (323–184 BCE) in the East and the politics of the city-states of the Hellenic world toward the West. The Achaemenids endorsed Zoroastrianism as the dominant official religion, but not as a state-sponsored institution in the service of the powers that be or a tool to achieve status and conquest. Rather, Zoroastrianism established a framework for personal and social self-understanding (identity) and set the standards for the ethos of the civitas, without granting the polity a dogma that could license people of faith to brand fellow citizens they did not like as “other.” Some have called this civitas the first polity to advocate for tolerance and cultural diversity (Bozeman 2017). How did the Achaemenids view “presence, ethos and theatre?” What kind of presence caused their political to be developing, dynamic, and thriving? What set of mechanisms, social imaginary or ethos did they create to facilitate and encourage such a presence, and what kind of public space, arena, and theater did they establish to embody that presence?

Presence: Soldiers of the Good; Cyrus and Darius Like all moral orders, the notion of presence in the Persian civitas meant appearing within the bounds of its social imaginary. I will delve into that in the next section under “ethos,” but suffice it to say here that it amounted to attuning one’s heart, mind, and the soul to the very tune of standing with and fighting for its cause. The civitas included

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everyone, regardless of personal idiosyncrasy or social standing. If this sounds very Platonic, it is! In both Persian and Platonic thought, one should live up to the expectations that the order of things has bestowed upon each one of us. Indeed, there is a rich body of literature suggesting that Plato borrowed his ideas not only from the Persians, but also from the Vedic sacred traditions among Aryans, who migrated to India and Iran sometime in the second millennium BCE (e.g., Badi 1991; Mojtabaei 1352/1972; Panoussi 1356/1977). Whoever attunes his heart, mind, and the soul most keenly to the music of the order of being has the biggest presence in the political. And of course, that requires constant exertion and struggle, hence the notion of the “soldiers of the good.” Here, I will concentrate on the two examples I mentioned in the introduction: the “conqueror with a vision” who initiated and made the powerful polity of the Achaemenids and the “statesman with a vision” who successfully saved that polity and transformed it into a civitas worthy of narration, praise, and admiration. Ostensibly, though, even statesmen who save polities and make them civitates are not oblivious to power. Quite the contrary: they are aware of power and power struggles in the political and are even more conscious that power should ultimately serve as a means to an end. Hence, they handle it responsibly and are not caught in the euphoria of military victory but go beyond it. One could say that conquerors with vision act as aggressors when gaining and attaining power, but that they act as statesmen when it comes to exercising and implementing that power. And statesmen with vision might appear as aggressors when maintaining power and the polity, because even the maintenance of power involves power struggles and sometimes even requires conquest. The man who was destined to initiate the Achaemenids’ polity was Cyrus (c. 600–530 BCE), from the “Persian” tribe of the Aryans, people who had migrated to the Iranian plateau sometime in the previous millennium. He became famous as Cyrus the Great. He was the son of a local king in the city of Ashnan in the Beyza plain in Fars Province, about 43 km west of what became the great capital of the civitas, Persepolis, whose ruins still attract thousands of visitors yearly. Cyrus succeeded to the throne of the King of Ashnan in 559 BCE following his father’s death, but like his father had to submit to the governorship of his maternal grandfather Astyages, the overlord of the whole region at the time and the king of the Medes (ruled c. 678–549 BCE).

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Here, I will concentrate on Cyrus’s three conquests. They demonstrate very well his competence as a military leader, but also, in each conquest he conducted his relationships with the enemy as a conqueror with a vision who thought beyond power and its maximization. These conquests are his victories over the Medes, the dominant dynasty in the Persian plateau before the Achaemenids; the Lydians, the people who ruled Western Anatolia; and the Babylonians, the people who lived in Ancient Mesopotamia (which included Cyrus’s liberation of Jerusalem from Babylonian rule). The first conquest for Cyrus was to liberate himself and his kingdom from rule by Medes, even though their king was his grandfather. According to Herodotus, members of the Persian tribe had long desired this, and the emergence of Cyrus offered a good opportunity to realize their dream. In the words of Herodotus: “The Persians, who had long been impatient of the Median dominion, now that they had found a leader, were delighted to shake off the yoke” (Book 1: 127). But this conquest did not come easily. Cyrus did not initiate the hostility, though. Astyages wanted to destroy the new king of Ashnan and managed to defeat him in some three battles in the long war that lasted three years 553–550 BCE (Briant 1387/2008: 49). The war ended, however, with Cyrus’s victory in the fourth battle which made the Medes “slaves instead of lords, and slaves moreover of those who till recently had been their subjects” (Herodotus: 1: 129). It is recorded that in the end, the general and some of the army officers of the Medes deserted their former masters and joined Cyrus’s camp, which surely must have benefited Cyrus. Astyages seems to have created resentment among his own people, whose downfall Herodotus describes as the “consequence of his cruelty,” which also “brought [the Medes] under the rule of the Persians” (ibid.: 130). With this victory, Cyrus made his grandfather his own subject, but he treated him with respect and fairness, a practice he demonstrated toward others in later conquests. According to Herodotus, “Cyrus kept Astyages at his court during the remainder of his life, without doing him any further injury” (ibid.). By some accounts, Cyrus even appointed Astyages as governor of a region. Cyrus’s victory over the Medes also meant that the little kingdom of Ashnan became a regional as well as a global player on the political chessboard of the time. Lydia, a kingdom in Western Anatolia, became the next focus of Cyrus’s advances to domination, although some accounts blame Croesus, the king of Lydia, for initiating the war, which broke out

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sometime in 547 BCE. Lydia was well known as a rich kingdom with a very powerful army in the “Near East and in the Hellenic world; the coastal Greek city-states were paying enormous tribute to Lydia” (Briant 1387/2008: 51). As a symbol of its wealth, Croesus is credited with minting of the first fine golden coin. The conquest of Lydia changed the fortunes of the Persians: while “before the conquest of Lydia, the Persians possessed none of the luxuries or delights of life” (Herodotus 1: 71), the conquest yielded enormous riches. Having a good knowledge of Lydian military power, Cyrus called upon his allies, the Egyptians, the Babylonians, and the Spartans, for aid, “according to the terms of the alliance which he had concluded” with them (ibid.: 77). They responded positively to his request. When Cyrus was sure of his superior force, he sent an emissary to Croesus calling for him to submit without engaging in a destructive war, but when the response was negative, he launched war. “The two armies met in the plain before Sardis. It is a vast flat, bare of trees” (ibid.: 80). Croesus withdrew to the city of Sardis, which gave Cyrus an opportunity to lay siege to the city. Croesus thought “the place would hold out, no inconsiderable time” (ibid.: 81). He was proven wrong and the city fell in two weeks, with Croesus being taken as prisoner. It is certain that Cyrus did not kill Croesus and the legend has it that Cyrus made him one of his councillors, but what truly happened to him remains a mystery (Evans 1978: 39). The next major conquest of Cyrus relates to Assyria, which according to Herodotus, “possesse[d] a vast number of great cities, whereof the most renowned and strongest at this time was Babylon” (Book 1: 178). Apparently, the Assyrians were aware of Cyrus’s intentions because “when they saw Cyrus conquering nation after nation, they were convinced that he would never stop, and that their turn would come at last” (ibid.: 190). He did march toward the Babylonian state in 539 but did not personally lead the army that captured its capital on October 4th. All indications show that the entry was relatively peaceful, so perhaps Cyrus had previously negotiated the acquiescence of the Babylonian army. Sometime later, Cyrus entered the city himself and with that victory, he implicitly suggested that he had completed his conquests when he described himself thus: “I am Cyrus, king of the universe, the great king, the powerful king, king of Babylon, king of Sumer and Akkad, king of the four quarters of the world” (Cyrus Cylinder: Line 20). This declaration is part of an inscription known as the Cyrus Cylinder, which is a masterpiece of declaration, legitimation, and, one could even

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say, political propaganda. For me, the fact that as a conqueror he felt it necessary to launch such a political campaign indicates that he had a long-term vision. He did not destroy the defeated city, or its temples and he forbade any punishment of the people. He allowed the free movement of people. But more importantly, he embraced the ideals and traditions of the local region by legitimating his conquest according to local mores. There is no doubt that Cyrus was a conqueror, but it appears that he was a principled, pragmatic, and dignified warrior. Let us read his own testimony to this effect: “When I entered Babylon in a peaceful manner, in rejoicing and celebration, I established my lordly abode in the royal palace. Marduk, the great lord, established for me as [a friend of] Babylon the great magnanimity of one who loves Babylon. Daily, I sought his worship” (lines 22–23). He acknowledges that he has empathy and friendship for the Babylonians, and he makes sure to give credit to their god Marduk, the Babylonian lord of all other gods. It is interesting to note that Marduk was considered a deity who presided over compassion, healing, regeneration, justice, and fairness. Did Cyrus want people to associate him with these qualities? It is highly possible, considering how immediately after these lines, one reads the following: My vast army marched peacefully in the midst of Babylon. I did not allow any troublemaker in all of the land [of Sumer] and Akkad. I shepherded in well being the city of Babylon and all its cultic centers. The citizens of Babylon […] upon whom he [i.e. Nabonidus, the deposed leader] had imposed a yoke which was not decreed for them as if without divine intention. I put to rest their exhaustion, their burden(?) I released. Marduk, the great] lord, rejoiced at [my good] deeds and kindly sent blessings upon me, Cyrus, the king who worships him. (Lines 24–27)

Cyrus was principled, pragmatic, and dignified, as I said, and these are not exaggerations. “He was a gentle king whose kindness was exemplary, so much so that he was granted the tittle of ‘the father of the nation’” (Ehtesham 1355/1976: 39). As a result, the Iranians regarded him as “The Father,” the Babylonians as “The Liberator,” the Greeks as “The “Law-Giver,” and the Jews as “The Anointed of the Lord.” Cyrus the Great appears to be one of the first conquerors in Iran with a “we vision,” and the most notable one in the world, one who managed to initiate a civilization admired by friends and foes and that earned him a place in the Bible, where he is explicitly named twenty-three times. After his death, a

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close relative, Darius the Great (556–486 BCE), followed in his footsteps and achieved even more. If Cyrus was the founder of the Achaemenids’ polity, with a vision for a civitas, Darius became its architect. The third king of the Achaemenids’ civitas, Darius ruled from 522 BCE until his death. Darius’s father was a member of the royal Achaemenid family as well as the local ruler of the province of Bactria. His grandfather was also a local governor who had accompanied Cyrus the Great on some expeditions. All this is to say that Darius grew up in a royal household and was well versed in the art of statesmanship from an early age. For example, he proved adept at the art of accommodation and at inclusive governance. Indeed, the manner in which he assumed power is testimony to his skill and artisanship and an indication of what was to come during his tenure in office. Here is some context. The Achaemenids experienced an existential crisis when an imposter named Gaumata took advantage of an incident in the royal court and declared himself the new king in 522. Apparently, King Cambyses had secretly killed his brother or half-brother Bardiya (Smerdis in Greek texts) before departing for an expedition from which he never returned. Gaumata, who resembled Bardiya and somehow knew about the mysterious death, seized the opportunity to declare himself king. Darius, who had played a major military role during the reign of Cambyses and was from the royal court, rose to the occasion and by securing the collaboration of the heads of major families in Iran at the time, whom I call citizens of the polity, dispatched with the imposter (Briant 1387/2008: 173–174). He did not, however, immediately take over, but rather first consulted with the heads of these major families about the future regime. Herodotus offers a good report of this consultation. Three participants, including Darius, offered three different forms of regimes—democratic republic, aristocracy, and monarchy—as alternatives for the future. Otanes, who, incidentally, was the first person to suspect the imposter king, argued for the first alternative, Megabyzues argued for the second, and Darius argued the last (Book 3: 80–82). After refuting the merits of the other two, Darius argued that history and tradition showed that monarchy chose the best person for the job and in the end finished his argument by saying: “we ought not to change the laws of our forefathers when they work fairly; for to do so is not well” (ibid.: 82),1 which 1 In Iranian history Deioces is credited with being the first monarch (in old Persian, Shah, literally meaning the best). He also was chosen by the head of various Aryan tribes

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seems to have won the vote of the majority. In Herodotus’s words, “Such were the three opinions brought forward at this meeting; the four other Persians voted in favour of the last” (ibid.: 83). Otanes abstained, but insisted on his position of neither “to rule nor to be ruled,” which he demanded for himself and his family, of course, within the boundaries of the laws of the new civitas that the new king agreed and respected. Thus, Darius assumed the throne and embarked upon turning Cyrus’s polity into a civitas. But of course, the transition of power was not as smooth. He had to prove himself a worthy candidate by responding to challengers outside the council of the heads of big families. It took him more than a year of a balanced policy of clemency accompanied by swiftness or as it is commonly called in today’s political jargon, “carrot and stick,” to achieve this, particularly when it came to some of the staunch supporters of Bardya, whether the real one or the imposter. Darius deployed a combination of diplomacy and punishment, as well as calculated and prudent distribution of loyal forces throughout the civitas, to finally establish both peace and his own undisputed authority by the end of 521 BCE. He then turned to achieving the role, according to his inscriptions, by which he wanted to be remembered, namely as a lawgiver and an organizer or, in my vocabulary, a civilization maker. In this sense, for me the second clue to Darius’s modus operandi as a statesman is found in this statement: “we ought not to change the laws of our forefathers.” To me, this reveals his perception of and attitude toward the human condition in two senses of the word. On the one hand, it means being mindful of the human condition, which always lies somewhere between past and future. Human beings must always value the past for the betterment and continuation of the future. I remind the reader of the maxim I cited in chapter one: “invent your own religion or it means nothing to you; follow the religion of your parent or you lose it.” I think Darius was quite aware of this; thus he did invent his ethos and ways of doing things (his religion) and at the same time he was conscious also of doing the opposite by respecting the tradition of his ancestors. The other sense of the human condition, even though related to the first, pertains to the fact that even though human beings should and do

of the time because, as Herodotus describes, “when they heard of the singular uprightness of Deioces and of the equity of his decisions, they joyfully had recourse to him in the various quarrels and suits that arose, until at last they came to put confidence in no one else” (Book 1: 96).

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modify and revise their ethos, they must do so piecemeal and very gradually. For example, history records the Sargon of Akkad (??–2279 BCE), the Mesopotamian statesman, as the first to create “kingship” as a political paradigm by uniting the city-states of his time sometime around 2300 BCE, when according to inscriptions “The god Enlil gave to him (the Upper Sea) [the Mediterranean] and the (Lower Sea) [the Persian Gulf])” (Nippur inscription of Sargon). The legitimacy of such an institution rarely came into question by the masses of the people until the public beheading of the monarch in France by the means of the guillotine, on January 21, 1793. In the case of Iran, that legitimacy came into question when the King was assassinated by a barraged citizen on May 1, 1896. Still today, in many countries of the world, even for those who have a republican political regime, the institution of the king survives side by side with the modern notion of polity. Besides preserving “the laws of our forefathers,” Darius’s statesmanship displays the conduct and many of the qualities that also characterize responsible public figures of the modern period in his role as an officer of law and order and welfare. Likewise, he also served as the embodiment of uprightness and public morality or, according to my terminology, as the caretaker of human’s “heat, mind and soul.” Darius achieved fame as a superb organizer and a just administrator (Ehtesham 1355/1976: 100–101), and to be known as such even during his lifetime is a great tribute. I also endorse the precise summary that Pierre Briant, an Iranologist who has published a massive work on the Achaemenids, offers: “The epigraphic record of Darius’s activities as a builder is rich” (2002: 165), and here builder is used in the broadest sense of the term. Maybe it is in part for these reasons that he became known as “the Great,” like Cyrus. What else might explain this appellation? I am certain that part of the reason was his military victories, which extended the boundaries of the polity beyond what Cyrus established, but here I am more interested in the governance institutions he erected. For example, he initiated the restoration of many places that had been left to ruin, initiated new construction, and of course began the creation the great complex of Persepolis. As he puts it himself: “Darius the king says: by the grace of Ahura Mazda, I completed numerous constructions that previously had been left unfinished. I saw the fortifications at Susa that had been previously constructed fall prey to age; I rebuilt them. These are (in fact) quite other fortifications that I myself have built” (cited in ibid.).

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In terms of governance, he considered that these restoration project contributed to more peaceful conduct of managing and dealings with various peoples. Here is how he explained his conduct: “The countries that fought each other, whose peoples killed each other, I fixed, by the grace of Ahura Mazda, so that their peoples did not kill each other, and I restored each one to its place. And, faced with my decrees, they respected them, in such a way that the strong did not strike nor despoil the poor” (cited in ibid.: 166). He paid attention to restoring old capitals such Pasargadae, Babylon, and Ecbatana, which to me is a sign of respect for previous dynasties and rulers. But his biggest project was the initiation of a new capital 60 km northeast of the city of Shiraz in Fars Province, “by raising a monumental terrace that would cover 125,000 sq. m. upon completion,” 1770 m (more than 5800 feet) above the sea level (ibid.: 168). The following is how Darius humbly reported his plan: And Darius the king says: “On this site where this fortress was built, previously no fortress had been built there. By the grace of Ahura-Mazda, this fortress, I constructed it according to the plan of Ahura-Mazda, all the gods [being] with him…. And Darius the king says: “I, may Ahura-Mazda protect me, all the gods [being] with him, and also this fortress, and also what was planned for this site.” (cited in ibid.)

I describe him as humble here because in this short passage he credits the Great Aryan God Ahura Mazda, as well as other gods of the time, for achieving this project. It is reported that construction began for Persepolis either in 518 or 519 BCE, and based on inscriptions, it began to function as a public institution in 502, but it took 120 years to complete the project. It was a complex amalgamation of palaces and great halls that functioned as the capital of the civitas, and included the private residence of the king and official meeting places, used especially during the celebration of the Persian New Year at the spring equinox. It was in full operation until Alexander the Great set it on fire, and despite that, it was still in use during the 70-year Greek occupation of Iran. As to Darius’s contribution for upholding and even enhancing the fair, diverse, and plural society that Cyrus set in motion, I will say more later. Suffice it to say here that the enormous number of royal Treasury Tablets documenting in detail the wages paid to people who worked in the construction of this enormous complex (Cameron 1948) are an indicator of the elaborate system of groups that worked for the royal

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court. According to Briant, “The Treasury Tablets basically contain the names of specialized workers in the building trades and ornamental crafts” (2002: 429). Not only did they receive appropriate salaries, but also, they received rations of food and wine, since many of them were foreign workers. As Briant notes, “Between 507 and 500 [BCE], certain tablets record the transport to Persepolis of grain, flour, and wine intended for craftsmen’s rations” (ibid.: 430). Another aspect of Darius’s modus operandi was to trust people with their own affairs. Although he did not agree with Otanes’s proposal to make the regime a democratic republic and instead defended monarchy as a time-honored system, he did agree with the principle of decentralization of power, establishing twenty governments with extensive autonomy throughout the empire (Herodotus, Book 3: 89). Before discussing this system in more detail, I would like to conclude this section by noting Darius’s meticulous attention to the legal system and his awareness that despite his belief in the centrality of the role of the king, it was the strength of the legal system and the incorruptibility of the judges that guaranteed a sense of security for presence to occur and for individuals to perform human and in turn produce civility. Herodotus reports judges who “had been crucified by Darius …on the charge of taking a bribe to determine a cause wrongly” (Book 7: 194). He was well aware of Hammurabi (1810–1750 BCE), the sixth king of the First Babylonian dynasty, and shamelessly borrowed from his code: “Darius was determined to create a book of laws and cases as lasting as those of Hammurabi. In fact, Darius borrowed many key concepts from Hammurabi and copied many others outright” (Poolos 2008: 52). My review of many accounts of Cyrus’s and Darius’s greatness has led me to the conclusion that their highest virtue was humility. Both repeatedly credited the Greatest God among the Persian gods for their achievements, status, and being. We have already encountered such declarations, but the following is the most common: “Greatest is the Wise Lord, who is the greatest of gods. He created Darius [as] king. He Bestowed kingship/kingdom on him. By the Wise Lord’s will, Darius is king” (cited in Lincoln 2012: 408). In terms of the humility of the actual conduct of their presence in the political, I think their tolerance of diversity of religion and tradition and their support for a plurality of ethnicities, languages, and cultures demonstrate the ethos or the social imaginary of the Achaemenids’ civitas. As a final side note, I should add that even as to outside appearance Darius was reportedly handsome and

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tall: Strabo described him as “the most handsome of men, except for the length of his arms, for they reached even to his knees!” (XV: 3.21). Herodotus’s narrative of what the Persians themselves said about these two figures is interesting and revelatory: “the Persians say that Darius was ‘a Kapelos ’ [a businessman/a dealer/a tradesman], … and Cyrus a father; for Darius looked to making a gain in everything,… while Cyrus was gentle” (Book 3: 89). I deliberately cite the Greek transliteration here because the word Kapelos has interesting undertones for me of a person of civilization production. While some scholars have argued that Herodotus was being pejorative toward Darius (e.g., Kurke 1999: 71–73), obviously I disagree. For me, a person who aims to create a civitas must deal with the world and cultivate entrepreneurship in all aspects of life, as Darius does. Hence, Cyrus proved a fatherly figure of a conqueror with a vision, while Darius remained loyal in the role of a statesman with a vision to the end.

Ethos: Cosmos, Warrior, the Path of Happiness What moral order, social imaginary, rules of the game, mechanisms, or ethos facilitated appearing and presence for Cyrus and Darius? It seems that Zoroastrianism inspired and animated the Persian framework and shaped the Achaemenids’ moral order, even though other religious traditions also flourished and enjoyed reverence. In fact, I am aware that, among scholars of the Iranian ancient world, the debate over whether the ruling elite were Zoroastrian or whether the state religion of the polity was Zoroastrianism continues to linger. But that discussion has no effect on this work, because the Achaemenid rulers rightly noted that Zoroastrianism shapes people’s consciences as well as their consciousness. On the other hand, I claim this to be general principle: no dynamic and developing polity can afford to have a state religion, yet reverence for an official religion or, in Locke’s term, civil religion is necessary for the civitas. The distinction between state religion and official religion, civil religion or, one could say, civitas religion, is significant. As a reminder, I hope I have demonstrated sufficiently in part one of this book that all human units are in some ways a moral order, but the sources for the moral framework of such an order vary. I operate here with the presupposition that three worldviews serve as sources for humanity: divine-immanence, divine-transcendence and human-immanence. The first two possess a heavy religion undertone traditionally understood, while the last does not.

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Regardless of which one serves as the underlying framework, the official position or “religion” of a civitas shapes as aspects of the moral order. As to the role of religion in the modern civitas, the Canadian political philosopher Ronald Beiner rightly points out that the purpose and function of “civil religion was strictly to domesticate religion” (2011), but I would add that its purpose is also to domesticate or as the sociologists like to call it “socialize” the citizens. When the process of domestication and socialization happens in the political, including the official religion, it civilizes the society. On the other hand, “state religion” is inevitably mixed with politics (the authoritative allocation of values) and this leads to making religion the handmaiden and instrument of political power or, even worse, a means of justifying its misuses. Now, the question remains as to what the Iranian official religion of divine-immanence meant for the Achaemenid civitas. The first feature of the Iranian moral order or ethos is shared with almost all non-secular worldviews. These all presuppose that a combination of the physical and the non-physical or the imaginary world of the unseen comprises the sphere of being, hence any notion of truth includes this totality. Peoples of different cultures have called this totality by different names, but they all mean the same thing by it, which can be rendered inclusively as “the order of being” or even “cosmos,” by some accounts a concept of Aryan origin that appeared in the Hellenic world with the meaning of “the universe as an embodiment of order and harmony.” For this reason, it also has been taken to mean virtue, balance, morality, harmony, the path, and the like. Various cultures embrace this idea, with the Chinese naming it tao, the Indians dharma, the Persians rta/ asha, the Egyptians maat, the Greeks arete, and so on (Cornford 1957). The Persian rta/asha appears in the sacred book of Avesta in passim, meaning “the Right.” It is also sometimes translated as the Truth. This notion lies at the heart of being and encircles and permeates the totality of existence, so much so that even the creator and other deities are part of rta/ asha. It is this whole combination that produces righteousness. Even when the creator decides to choose an ally on Earth for its cultivation and upholding, the creator consults the Right. As reported in the Sacred Avesta: “The Creator asked the Right, ‘whom would you consider with sagacity and zeal to become the lord of order, to bring prosperity,

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repel violence and dispel the forces of Evil?’” (Yasna 29: 2).2 In a later Yasna, one learns the reasoning behind such a consultation: the Right not only conveys the nature and order of things, but it is also an indicator of the righteous path and the cultivator of the right conduct: “Teach me through the Right the noble path of truth and righteous thought and righteous conduct” (34: 12). In other words, ideally the Iranian world should function with a belief in an orderly world where an a priori system determines the status of everything and everyone, which in turn dictates their natural, social, and political hierarchy. This a priori assignment stems from the assumption that the natural world is good, orderly, and worth preserving, and that each human being has the choice either to contribute to the maintenance of such an order or to go against it. Gods are within creation, among human beings, witnessing everything. These gods were easily identified with natural and cosmic forces, for example, the gods of the Sun, the Earth, the Moon, and the winds, fire, and water. Adhering to the commands or the rules of the divine is the highest form of life on earth and results in human happiness. One should appreciate divinity in everything and everyone and even the things we normally refer to as “it,” should be considered holy and as though they are thou, whereas in the modern time we even refer to the “thou” as it. I think Hegel captured the essence of this worldview very accurately when he stated: Zoroaster’s “Light” belongs to the World of Consciousness- to Spirit as a relation to something distinct from itself. We see in the Persian World a pure exalted Unity, as the essence which leaves the special existences that inhere in it, free;— as the Light, which only manifests what bodies are in themselves;- a Unity which governs individuals only to excite them to become powerful for themselves. … The Persian Religion is therefore no idol-worship; it does not adore individual natural objects, but the Universal itself. (2001: 191 and 196)

As mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, the worldly implication of this universal message means that any political, social, or economic order must be a mirror image of this universe. But how? The Iranian 2 Yasna is first component of the Avesta, the holy book of Zoroastrianism. A few of its parts form “Gatha,” the most sacred part of Avesta, and they are considered the direct words of Prophet Zarathustra. Yasna plus four other components (Vispard, Vandidad, Yashtha and Khordeh-Avesta) form the sacred texts of the Zoroastrians.

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sacred texts formulate the answer to this concern with the role they assign to any individual human being in that universal moral order. What are the features of this universe? It is centered on (1) the Right and Truth, symbolized by the greatest god among the gods, Ahura Mazda the creator; (2) the existence of an opposite force to the Right, i.e., the Wrong or the lie (daruga), as important as the Right, but in the negative sense; and (3) human beings who live in a condition of in-between these two elements. Each human being is thus a “warrior” endowed with the choice of devoting their life either to the cause of the Right or that of the Wrong. In other words, one’s thought, speech, and deeds are either righteous, thus helping the Right, or they are unrighteous, helping the Wrong. In this battle everyone has the responsibility of participating and choosing side, with a “prominent position assigned to the king as God’s chosen instrument” (Lincoln 2012: 4). From the triumvirate of the Right, the Wrong, and human beings, a well-established corresponding practical guide has developed. It proposes that every human agency, including the king, expresses and manifests its potentials and tendencies in the world. This new triumvirate includes Humata, righteous thoughts; Hukhata, righteous words; and Huvarshata, righteous deeds. Note the following passage from the Zoroastrian holy text: “I celebrate my praises for the righteous thought, righteous words, and righteous deeds for my thoughts, my speeches, and my actions. With chanting praises, I present all righteous thoughts, righteous words, and righteous deeds” (“Yasna” 11: 17). According to Avesta, by purifying one’s life through “righteous thoughts, righteous words and righteous deeds” (“Yasna” 57: 34), one appears among others and makes presence in the political. This is a general rule for all creatures. Even other deities in the Iranian cosmological worldview of divine-immanence, such the Amesha Spenta (the seven deities emanating from the greatest deity, Ahura Mazda), meditate through this major triumvirate (Boyce, “Humata, Hushta, Huvarshata,” Encyclopaedia Iranica). The threesome of right thought, right speech, and right deeds are meant to be observed in all aspects of life, whether private appearance or public performances. The Greek historian, philosopher, and soldier Xenophon (431–354 BCE) uses the life and career of Cyrus the Great to portray, masterfully and in full detail, the meticulous ways “the good warrior” prepares to fight on the side of Right. In fact, the following instruction offered by Darius, as reported by Xenophon, is informative:

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We think, furthermore, that we have observed in Cyrus that he held the opinion that a ruler ought to excel his subjects not only in point of being actually better than they, but that he ought also to cast a sort of spell upon them…. He trained his associates also not to spit or to wipe the nose in public, and not to turn round and look at anything, as being men who wondered at nothing. All this he thought contributed, in some measure, to their appearing to their subjects, men who could not lightly be despised. (The Cyropaedia, book 8, I: 42–43)

Iranians, particularly those who assumed public roles and had to master righteous thought, righteous words, and righteous deeds, understood the pursuit of righteousness as an art that required training and enormous exercise. This art included acquiring physical as well as mental skills and practices (Rajaee 1385/2006: 80–85), because according to a Persian aphorism, “a sane mind resides in a sane body.” Plato’s observation that this preparation requires four wise tutors is even more revelatory and comprehensive: The first of these teaches him [the novice], the Magian lore of Zoroaster… that is the worship of the gods…. The justest teaches him to be truthful all his life long; the most temperate [teaches him] not to be mastered by even a single pleasure, in order that he may be accustomed to be a free man;… [and] the bravest trains him to be fearless and undaunted, telling him that to be daunted is to be enslaved. (Alcibiades I: 122 a)

The combination of these teachings leads to the infusing of Right and Warriorship (constant righteous conduct), which in turn leads to the defeat and elimination of the Wrong. The result means the player’s behavior remains within the parameter of the Path, that is, doing the right thing and doing it in the right way. This, according to the Achaemenid moral order, amounts to happiness, as clearly stated in one of the inscriptions: “The man who conducts himself according to the law that the Wise Lord had set down and who worships the Wise Lord at the proper time and in the proper ritual style, he becomes happy when living (jiva siyata) and truthful/righteous when dead” (cited in Lincoln 2012: 260). In fact, according to experts on the Achaemenids’ world, all creation was about “happiness” (siyata in Old Persian, reincarnated as shad in Middle and Modern Persian). Further, when conducting its warriorship on the side of the Right, the human presence in the political guarantees happiness but if warriorship is exercised on the side of Wrong, it causes its

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ruin and destruction. For example, Lincoln has titled his well-argued and thoroughly-documented book on “Achaemenian Religion and the Imperial Project” Happiness for Mankind. Indeed, the following statement may serve as a pointed summary of the Achaemenid moral order or ethos: “As we have repeatedly stressed, one of the most striking features of the Achaemenid cosmology is that it situates the Wise Lord’s establishment of ‘Happiness for Mankind’ (siyati…martiyahya) as the culminating act of creation.” Lincoln is quick, however, to point out the following: “And, as we also have regularly noted, such happiness was finite, for at a later moment in human history ‘the lie’ (drauga) [the Wrong, in my rendering] entered existence, bringing all other evils in its wake” (ibid.: 406–407). As in my account of the moment of flourishing civitates, the state of “happiness” is not a natural or permanent condition, but a precarious occurrence whose existence depends on constant human vigilance. One could argue that a general logical conclusion of the triumvirate Cosmos, Warrior, and The Path, with its implicit emphasis on righteous thoughts, righteous words, and righteous deeds, would be tolerance for cultural diversity and societal plurality, for the practical reason that the form righteousness might take is contingent upon temporal and spatial considerations and requirements. In this geographically massive domain that included the Hellenic world in western Anatolia, Bactria in the northeast, the Mesopotamian city-states in western Asia, and the Aryan world of the Indian subcontinent in south-east, there must have been a variety of versions of the cosmological and divine-immanence worldview. So, it is not all surprising to me that Cyrus or other Achaemenid kings invoked Ahura Mazda when speaking to the Persians, and invoked Marduk when speaking to the Babylonians, and Egyptian Gods when they addressed the Egyptians, and that they assumed each name refers alike to the same Great Creator, whose main concerns centered on the happiness of mankind. As such, the first area of diversity under Achaemenid rule was acceptance of diverse religions in the various part of the civitas, under the rubric of the official religion of Zoroastrianism. This became obvious immediately after Cyrus victoriously entered Babylon and made open declarations such as: “I sought the safety of the city of Babylon and all its sanctuaries. As for the population of Babylon …, [w]ho as if without div[ine intention] had endured a yoke not decreed for them, I soothed their weariness; I freed them from their bonds(?). Marduk, the great lord, rejoiced at [my good] deeds” (Cyrus Cylinder: Line 25–26). The religious policy

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of Cyrus and his successors focused on encouraging diversity, a practice that is well recorded in history. The way in which Cyrus expresses it in his Cylinder is accepted as more or less stating facts. He claims that he helped and encouraged the people …whose shrines had earlier become dilapidated, the gods who lived therein, and made permanent sanctuaries for them. I collected together all of their people and returned them to their settlements, and the gods of the land of Sumer and Akkad which Nabonidus- to the fury of the lord of the gods- had brought into Shuanna, at the command of Marduk, the great lord, I returned them unharmed to their cells, in the sanctuaries that make them happy. (ibid.: Line 31–34)

The most famous case relates to the fate of the Jewish people in Babylonia after the Achaemenids captured the Babylonians and their capital. Following his arrival in Babylon, Cyrus ordered that all who had been captured and held as enslaved people were now free. If they chose to do so, they could return to their homeland; he even offered material help and subsidized their efforts to relocate and rebuild their temples. Among the liberated captives were 50,000 Jews who had been held in Babylon for generations. Cyrus encouraged them to return to Jerusalem and to rebuild their temples, a policy that Darius and his successors would also support. The best-kept records of this are found in the Hebrew Bible, particularly in the books of Daniel, Isaiah, and Ezra. According to Briant, “The terms used by the author of Second Isaiah are reminiscent of certain passages in the Cyrus Cylinder” (2002: 46). Note, for example, in particular Isiah 45:1: “This is what the Lord says to his chosen one, to Cyrus, whose right hand I hold in order to subdue nations before him, and disarm kings to open doors before him, so gates remain unclosed.” In terms of offering actual help to the Jewish people, the following verse (44:28) is even more direct and specific: “Cyrus, the one I appointed as shepherd to carry out all my wishes and to decree concerning Jerusalem, ‘She will be rebuilt,’ and concerning the temple, ‘It will be reconstructed.’” Further, one encounters a more elaborate and specific narrative of this episode in the book of Ezra where the support and the direct involvement of the royal court is explained as follows: In the first year of Cyrus the king, King Cyrus decreed: Temple of God in Jerusalem. The Temple will be rebuilt as a place at which sacrifices are

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offered and to which offerings are brought to be burnt. Its height is to be sixty cubits, its width sixty cubits. There are to be three thicknesses of stone blocks and one of wood. T h e expense is to be met by the king’s household. Furthermore, the vessels of gold and silver from the Temple of G o d which Nebuchadnezzar took from the sanctuary in Jerusalem and brought to Babylon are to be restored so that everything may be restored to the sanctuary in Jerusalem and be put back in the Temple of God. (Ezra 6: 2–5)

Briant thinks that Cyrus’s policies toward the Jewish community “were exceptional compared with normal relations between a Near Eastern sovereign and an ethnoreligious community” (ibid.: 47). This “exceptional” behavior by Cyrus, however, soon became the accepted norm in the Achaemenids’ civitas. There are similar shining reports about other kings of the Achaemenids. Darius the Great continued the same policies toward the Jewish community, as reported in the Book of Daniel. Not only did Darius afford freedom to Daniel but he even appointed him to a position of high authority. When jealous rivals tried to discredit Daniel by reporting to the king that he worshiped God instead of the king, Darius gave Daniel a chance to defend himself, and in the end he made a public declaration urging people to trust Daniel “in every dominion of my kingdom” (the Book of Daniel, 6: 25). The section concludes by stating that “Daniel prospered in the reign of Darius, and in the reign of Cyrus the Persian” (ibid.: 28). Other parts concur with this depiction of Darius, including, for example, his behavior toward the gods of Egypt after the conquest of that land. Moreover, there are records of explicit instructions to army commanders, governors, and other regional and local administrators calling for respect of local and indigenous religions, cultures, and particularly other deities. As an example, upon invading and capturing the Greek island of Delos, the Iranian general, discovered that people and, particularly religious groups, were fleeing. He immediately made the following declaration, according to Herodotus’s Histories: Why are ye fled, O holy men? Why have ye judged me so harshly and so wrongfully? I have surely sense enough, even had not the king so ordered, to spare the country which gave birth to the two gods -to spare, I say, both the country and its inhabitants. Come back therefore to your dwellings; and once more inhabit your island. (Book 6: 97)

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The Achaemenid tolerance of diversity extended to the cultural realm as well. Before I discuss this point, I remind the reader that cultures are usually polyglot, while a civitates develops a lingua franca that serves as a means of communication among those polyglot cultures but allows for local cultures, with their multiplicity of languages, to flourish. Yet, sometimes the lingua franca may differ from that of the people who created the polity that became the power center of the fledging civilization. As an example, one could consider the three Muslim civilizations that emerged in Anatolia, Iran, and India from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century. As I have mentioned before, even though the ruling elite in all three civitates, the Ottomans, the Safavids, and the Mughals, were Turkic, the lingua franca of all three became Persian. The same applies for the Achaemenids. Even though the language of the ruling elite was “old Persian,” and even though official communication took place in this language, the language of civitas was what later scholars have dubbed “Imperial Aramaic.” As one scholar puts it, it became the “vehicle for written communication between the different regions of the vast empire with its different peoples and languages. The use of a single official language, which modern scholarship has dubbed Official Aramaic or Imperial Aramaic, can be assumed to have greatly contributed to the astonishing success of the Achaemenids in holding their far-flung empire together for as long as they did” (Shaked 1987: 251). But it was far from being the only language, or even the most prominent one. The following passage from Briant is informative: The documentation from the reigns of Darius and Xerxes reveals the general spread of Aramaic in the Satrapal bureaucracies: in Persepolis itself, Babylonia, Egypt, Sardis, Dascylium, and all the way onto the Iranian Plateau. Nonetheless, the administrative spread of Aramaic did not displace the local languages. Naturally, we are reminded of the command given by Ahasuerus in the book of Esther, “to each province in its own script and to each people in its own language” (3:12; cf. Daniel 3:4,7; 6:26) and of the order given by Darius at Behistun. (2012: 507)

And of course, with the diversity of languages, that is, the formal acceptance of multilingualism, comes the flourishing of regional and local cultures and mores. Briant’s observation about the link between languages and cultural pluralism is accurate: “The Persians had never

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attempted to attack the recognized traditions of their subjects: the multiethnic Empire remained multicultural, as is shown, for example, by its extraordinary linguistic diversity” (ibid.: 868). To me, the clearest evidence of the presence of multiple cultural groups could be seen in a tablet describing the building of Darius’s palace in Susa: The cedar timber, this -a mountain named Lebanon -from there was brought. The Assyrian people, it brought it to Babylon; from Babylon the Carians and the Ionians brought it to Susa. The yakâ-timber was brought from Gandara and from Carmania. The gold was brought from Sardis and from Bactria, which here was wrought. The precious stone lapis lazuli and carnelian which was wrought here, this was brought from Sogdiana. The precious stone turquois, this was brought from Chorasmia, which was wrought here. The silver and the ebony were brought from Egypt. The ornamentation with which the wall was adorned, that from Ionia was brought. The ivory, which was wrought here, was brought from Ethiopia and from Sind and from Arachosia. The stone columns which were here wrought, a village named Abiradu, in Elam -from there were brought. The stonecutters who wrought the stone, those were Ionians and Sardians. The goldsmiths who wrought the gold, those were Medes and Egyptians. The men who wrought the wood, those were Sardians and Egyptians. The men who wrought the baked brick, those were Babylonians. The men who adorned the wall, those were Medes and Egyptians. (Lines 30–55)

More than ten nationalities are mentioned in this passage. The diversity and plurality in the ethos of the Achaemenids’ moral order were reflected in the theater and throughout the structural and organization aspects of this civitas that inaugurated, once again in Hegel’s word, “the beginning of World-History.”

Theater; the Monarchy, Social Classes, Tributary Economy A sound, solid theater contributed to the working of the cosmological moral order and facilitated the presence of “good warriors.” The reader may have already gotten an impression of the Achaemenids’ politics in the debate over the future of the theater between Darius and his six allies, who became the wise councillors in the new regime. The institution of the monarchy took charge of politics, but what kind of institution was it? Reflecting the cosmological order of the gods,

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with Ahura Mazda in the highest position, there were local kings in the various regions, with “the King of kings” (Shahhanshah) occupying the highest place in the polity and acting as the ultimate authority and final arbiter. This, according to the Iranian historian of Persian ancient history Javad Mashkoor (1918–1995), was based on Avesta: “he was the great king” overseeing everyone (1347/1968: 63). The king had to have royal ancestry, hence what was known as the “kingly family” was itself a major player in Iranian history until the destruction of the monarchy in the 1979 revolution. In addition to having appropriate ancestry, he also had to be a person with chutzpah, depicted as the God-given light known as Farrah (light), and he had to gain the support of other major players or the heads of other powerful families. The King of kings would do this in two ways. The first was to make sure he had their support before taking power. The second was to consult with them whenever major decisions warranted it. There was another consultative body that could be called “the council of state,” composed of the king’s chief executive officer (Hezarbad), who came to be known in the history of Persian political thought as Sadr-Azam (chief minister), and some chief justices and other political elites. The most famous and well-respected kings in Iranian history were those who lived up to the image of the notion of “ideal kingship,” which resembled the concept of the “philosopher king” in Plato’s dialogues. The main task of the ideal king was to act as the father of nation and the guardian of the orderly and good life. I have formulated the parameters of “the institution of the ideal or best king” in a different work based on Avesta, the holy Zoroastrian texts, and the long epic poem of Shahnama (the Book of Kings), written by “the Sage” Abul-Qâsem Ferdowsi Tusi (940–1020) (Rajaee 1385/2006: 77–86). Those authoritative texts show, as I have said, that the main duty of the King of kings was to be a good arbiter, and not an autocratic ruler as a devotee to the cosmological order of being. For example, both Cyrus’s and Darius’s constant references to Ahura Mazda as the cause of their authority and the supporter of their decisions and practice was heeding to and acknowledgment of this ideal notion. And indeed, if and when a king took personal credit for any worldly success or the acquisition of authority, the grace of divineimmanence abandoned the royal heart, making him unfit to assume that role (ibid.: 86–89). Furthermore, consultation with powerful families and the existence of other kings contributed to the decentralization of power and functioned as a system of checks and balances (ibid.: 93–99).

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Thus, one could argue that the new monarchical regime came to be a consultative kingdom, with councils of the aristocracy, or what I prefer to call the “Council of Citizens.” Here is why: many people argue that citizenship is a new phenomenon and a by-product of the modern state, where the people are the sovereign. I argue, however, that this is to ignore what archaeologists have described as proto-democracies in Mesopotamia and the North Indian city-states of the ancient world, along with the city-state of ancient Athens. I contend that citizens have always been the sovereign, but who is included in the institution of citizenship has often been narrowly defined and restricted to select people according to their privilege, race, and/or wealth. What modernity and its fundamental idea and institution of “human rights” have done is to extend and expand the definition of the institution of citizenship to everyone. Citizens, whether everyone or the select few, theoretically have open access to kings or centers of power. In the case of ancient Persia and in the words of Herodotus, citizenship was “to be free to each whenever he pleased, to enter the palace unannounced, unless the king were in the company of one of his wives” (Book 3: 84). While the appellation “the Council of Citizens” may explain the meaning and the function of both consultative bodies, in terms of their position within the structure of the kingship, the council of the heads of the family could be call the “Royal Council,” through which the king made his decisions (Ehtesham 1355/1976: 44). For example, when he received a proposal from a foreign leader, “Cyrus, on this offer, called together the chiefs of the Persians, and laid the matter before them, requesting them to advise him what he should do” (Herodotus, Book 1: 206). Incidentally, for some major decisions, particularly international ones, the king would invite others to the council, even foreign nationals of major stature when occasion warranted (see, for example, ibid.: 155 and 207, as well as Book 3: 34 and 36). Meanwhile, the “Council of State” seems to have attended to domestic issues mainly, and thus, its membership was restricted to the holders of various important posts, including major justices and regional authorities. In addition to the councils, there were two other structures attached to the polity. One was an elaborate watchdog system called “the ears and the eyes of the king” (Cheshm-o Goosh-e Shah). Its main task was to travel throughout the civitas and report on the situation, whether among civilian or military authorities (Ehtesham 1355/1976: 48). The second was the development of an elaborate bureaucratic system of secretariats (Dabiran)

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that ended up creating a socio-functional class that was extremely influential in the working of this giant civitas. What gave this bureaucratic system its robustness and furthered its significant role in the polity was the development of the Old Persian cuneiform script. This had been invented by 525 BCE, but Darius amplified its role, using it widely and frequently for monument inscriptions. In summary, then, the monarchy that formed the backbone of this long-lasting regime was decentralized, highly organized, and yet consultative. One historian even claims that the “Achaemenids created the first confederation polity, appearing on the face of the Earth” (ibid.: 131). It is thus appropriate to say a few words about the administrative machinery. To begin with, initiating the administrative machinery was part of general economic reforms that Darius, the statesman with a vision, initiated and developed. In some ways, one could argue that the administrative arrangement helped to manage the economy. As Herodotus writes, Darius “proceeded to establish twenty governments of the kind which the Persians call Satrapies, assigning to each its governor, and fixing the tribute which was to be paid him by the several nations” (Book 3: 89). Each Satrapy, which etymologically meant “the protectorate,” was headed by a Satrap, meaning “the protector of the province.” Historically, the Medes had created a less organized and less efficient form of this governance, but Darius perfected it. Herodotus goes on to list all twenty of the Satrapies, along with the amount each had to pay as its tribute (Book 9: 94). Other accounts report twenty-three, twenty-six, and even thirty-six satrapies, which might be because boundaries and domains were constantly shifting. As I have mentioned, the Satraps had enormous local power, and some could even mint their own currency. They were not called kings, but in practice they were the kings of their provinces and were responsible for the maintenance of welfare, broadly defined, and some also served as judges. In terms of social organization, the Achaemenids’ civitas resembled most societies prior to the modern period. The main feature was hierarchical complementarity. In Taylor’s account, this hierarchy had three main classes of “oratores, bellatores, laboratores —those who pray, those who fight, and those who work. It was clear that each needed the others, but there is no doubt that we have here a descending scale of dignity; some functions were in their essence higher than others” (2004: 11, italics in the original). During the period of the Achaemenids, this pre-existing class order of priests, warriors, and farmers/workers became both more

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prominent and more prevalent. I should note that one should avoid the unfortunate notion of “caste” (breed, race), as seen in Portugal and India, for example, as a way of understanding this functional, complementarity system. The Achaemenid structure was hierarchical in the sense that some classes had higher status with regard to the functioning of the society, like the division of labor in contemporary society. And similar to contemporary functional positions of a given person or class, there could be different privileges for each, but all enjoy, at least in theory, shared human dignity derived from the concept of “human rights.” Members of this tripartite order enjoy the same rights due to the “divine honour”3 found in every creature. This explains the conduct of both Cyrus and Darius in their dealing with the various peoples of various different regions. In the case of the Achaemenids themselves, we should add bureaucrats (dabiran) to this order of three—priests, warriors, farmers/workers— because soon the decentralized polity required an elaborate secretariat to handle the volume of correspondence and the intensity of interactions. This new class became necessary during and after the rule of Darius, when the polity was becoming a civitas, and as Darius learned from the Babylonians the virtue of an elaborate bureaucracy. The mushrooming of inscriptions and the discovery of about 500,000 clay tablets are an indication of this transition. For example, more than 200,000 clay archival tablets have been found in Persepolis (Henkelman 2008: Chapter 2), which is a clear sign of an elaborate bureaucratic machine. The Sadr-Azam (chief minister) was near the peak of the power structure: in terms of legitimate authority, he was the second person after the King of Kings. To some degree, however, he was effectively the head of government. The chief minister became such a well-established institution that it became a permanent fixture political thought in the Muslim

3 The distinction between “honor” and “dignity,” to me points to an enormous difference between pre-modern and modern worldviews. In the former, to invoke a familiar notion of the Christian world, “man is created in God’s image” (e.g., in Genesis 1:26, 5:1, and 9:6), and thus that image gives humanity intrinsic worth, and should be honored in recognition of the divine connection. In the latter, humans are born with certain rights as stated in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights” (Article One), so human dignity should be protected.

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world.4 Thus, the social stratification included priests, warriors, bureaucrats, and farmers/workers, and part of the duty of king was to maintain and coordinate their working in cohesive and complementary fashion. Darius was as much an economist as he was an administrator. One could surmise that a corollary of the so-called the first confederate system would be a decentralized and multiform economy. Darius was convinced that this decentralized system should enjoy a health economy that basically depended on agricultural production and trade which was guided by and sometimes supported by the polity. Thus, three basic sectors owned land and co-existed side by side: the royal court, which managed it through the king’s chancellery, the religious temples, and the private sector. As has been well documented, these three layers worked efficiently through the gifts and tribute system. I will elaborate on that system, but first I should discuss the three major institutionalized reforms implemented by Darius that contributed to the flourishing of a robust economy and production. There are legal reforms, standardization of weight and measures, and the improvement of transportation infrastructures. In terms of the first, in a recent book by the contemporary Iranian sociologist, novelist, and historian Sherwin Vakili (b. 1974), Darius was known as a “spreader of justice/law” (1390/2011). This was apt: he behaved justly and created a legal system that was fair. Vakili bases his argument on Darius’s statements in his Behistun Inscription. First, he aspired to use the Greatest God, Ahura Mazda, as a model. He utilized the same notion, Data,5 broadly meaning justice, law and commandment, that is used in the Zoroastrian holy text for the attributes and the grace of Ahura Mazda: “Says Darius the king: Within these countries what man was watchful, him who should be well esteemed I esteemed; who was an enemy, him who should be well punished I punished; by the grace of Aura Mazda these countries respected my laws [Data]; as it was commanded by me to them, so it was done” (“Behistun Inscription,” Column 1; 4 One paradigmatic figure in Muslim history is Abu Ali Hasan ibn Ali Tusi (1018– 1092), better known by his honorific title of Nizam al-Mulk. He was the grand minister for almost three decades for two different kings until his death at the hand of a radical religionist assassins who kept the governmental engine running smoothly. As mentioned, the role of this institution became a major theme of Muslim political thought. In Iran itself, it even outlasted the monarch. The 1979 revolution abolished the monarchy, but the institution of grand minister lasted until the revision of the constitution of the new republic in 1989, which eliminated this office altogether. 5 Even today it is used in Iran, notably, for the legal system and the Minister of Justice.

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line 8). In Vakili’s words, for conveying “my laws” Darius “utilizes the word Data in ancient Persian language that is common in contemporary Persian…and in Avesta the word precisely means the same as Darius wanted to convey” (1309/2011: 362). Darius even claimed that not only he but also his family lived exemplary lives: “Says Darius the king: For this reason Aura Mazda bore me aid and the other gods which are, because I was not an enemy, I was not a deceiver, I was not a wrong-doer, neither I nor my family; according to rectitude [I ruled], I did not make my power an oppression,… the man who should have been well esteemed, I esteemed, and… the man who should deserve punishment, I punished” (“Behistun Inscription,” Column 4; line 13). The legal system developed under Darius helped the functioning of the polity rather well. In terms of weight and measures, each of these formerly independent polities in the informal confederation had their own measurement system. Very soon, Darius realized that without a universally accepted set of standards, civilization production was impossible. Thus, he created an elaborate scheme to implement a standardized system of weights and measures based on the value of metals, because they were used for payment and exchange. This was called “the royal standard” and it was swiftly embraced because it facilitated and enhanced exchange. Nevertheless, as Briant observed, “to be sure, the introduction of Persian weights did not make the other standards disappear” (2002: 414). As to infrastructure, the creation of land roads and waterways for the smooth exchange of commodities and trade traffic proved a great investment. Briant correctly points out that “The ancient authors were literally fascinated by the vast extent of the Achaemenid imperial territory” (ibid.: 357). The kings, particularly Darius, were quite aware of the necessity of creating a general network for communication and interaction between the diverse regions. One innovative way was to have not one, but many capitals, Pasargadae, Persepolis (Parse), Susa, Babylon, Ecbatana that “were linked by major highways, in a rough quadrilateral… [and] the capitals were connected to all the provinces” (ibid.: 358). These major roads were called “the royal roads.” Using Xenophon’s account, Briant calculates totaling 499 Parsangs (an Iranian unit of distance of 6 km, so in total 2,994 km/1,860 miles) with 77 rest areas (i.e., about one every 39 km or 24 miles). There were also other roads. In Briant’s words: “Of course, these itineraries are concerned only with the network of royal roads; many other itineraries, often much shorter and often following

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mountain or desert routes, are left out. We learn about the latter most often from accounts of military expeditions” (ibid.: 360). The combination of legal order, a system of weight and measures, and the road system facilitated the smooth working of a tributary economy. The vast territory of the civitas had a mixed mode of production which was also decentralized. As an historian from Shiraz University told me in a conversation a few years ago, the Achaemenid economy utilized agriculture, trade, but also a lively livestock. There were areas of highly sophisticated agricultural production such as Egypt and Bactria; there were vast areas devoted to raising livestock, not only for human consumption but also for the leather industry, and of course a dynamic trade system that took advantage of the secure and expanded road system. But what provided oversight to these systems and coordinated their relationship with the central government was the tributary economic system. When one visits what is left of Persepolis today, one can see a relief of various nations carrying tributes to present to the King of kings. In Briant’s words, “Darius’s tribute principle was simple: every community in the Empire had to turn over part of its produce (dasmos ) to the king of kings, including the less-known peoples (2002: 394). The French-Egyptian Marxist economist Samir Amin (1931–2018) considers it a sophisticated system and treats it as a “Tributary Ideology,” with its own “Tributary Culture” and socio-structural organizations and mechanisms comparable to capitalism (1989: 15–59). I feel Amin’s claim that almost all societies prior to the emergence of capitalist societies could be called tributary societies is accurate. And of course, this economic “theater,” to use my term, needed an elaborate system of accounting for collection, maintenance, and redistribution. “The original Persian documents presupposes a remarkable accounting of the diversity of the Empire, which had to have been based on an in-depth preliminary investigation that surely took several years to carry out. Unfortunately, we do not know the details of this operation” (Briant 2002: 394). It is true that the detailed working of the operation is not known, but we do know a great deal about the system of measures and scales that Darius introduced and that led to standardization of weight, measures, and coins. In terms of the latter, the Achaemenids created a sophisticated minting institution, as reported by Herodotus. It created the best coins of its time, including some of pure gold that were used as the royal coinage: “the first royal coinage was issued by Darius” (ibid.: 408). Briant thinks that this may have had a non-economic purpose as well, however, which he calls

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“the political function of the royal coinage.” In this case, “the innovation would in a way crown the achievements of Darius as a new founder” (ibid.). In support of this assessment, Briant cites the following account by Herodotus: “Darius wished to leave a memorial of himself, such as no king had ever left before…. Darius had refined gold to the last perfection of purity in order to have coins struck of it” (Book 4: 166). I should mention that while the monetary policy as well as the standardization of weight and measures were initiated by Cyrus, just as we see in all areas of civilization production, it was Darius who perfected it. One of the main consequences of these developments was in agricultural production and trade. Farmers who worked on their own land or the public lands known as the royal lands could easily predict the level and amount of tribute they had to offer to the central and local governments. In other words, the new monetary and weight and measure standards brought impersonal, transparent regularity, reducing arbitrariness while increasing fairness. As Herodotus describes: Artaphernes, Satrap of Sardis,… took the measurement of their whole country in parsangs - such is the name which the Persians give to a distance of thirty furlongs - and settled the tributes which the several cities were to pay, at a rate that has continued unaltered from the time when Artaphernes fixed it down to the present day. The rate was very nearly the same as that which had been paid before the revolt. Such were the peaceful dealings of the Persians with the Ionians. (Book 6: 42)

This indicates a major development in the economy because during the rule of the previous kings, there was no clarity about the tribute system, which was a major engine in the economy of the polity. In Herodotus’s words, “During all the reign of Cyrus, and afterwards when Cambyses ruled, there were no fixed tributes (Book 3: 89, italic added). The standardization in monetary policy impacted all aspects of trade. As one scholar puts it, “the financial policies of the Achaemenids strengthened the pricing system in relation to new metal currency” (Vakili 1390/2011: 401). I have already alluded to the fact that artisans, particularly those recruited from other polities for the construction of the palaces, were paid by commodities. Standardization made fair pay much easier and reduced the possibility of resentment. It also facilitated the functioning of the barter economy and “its conversion into a moneyed economy” (ibid.).

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∗ ∗ ∗ When I read this chapter over again early this morning, naturally I thought about what type of conclusion I might draw from its contents. Many different strains of ideas ran through my mind, but a little voice inside encouraged me to go for a walk before venturing onto the conclusion. I am glad I listened to it. I went for a long stroll in my neighborhood in South Ottawa on this mid-May morning in 2020. The weather was crisp and the sky blue, like Persian turquoise, partly because Ottawa generally is a relatively unpolluted city, but mostly due to the respite that the earth has received from the self-isolation and industrial standstill due to COVID-19. I was walking on the pathway. It was rather quiet and all of sudden I imagined myself walking on one of the “royal roads” of the Achaemenids’ civitas. Physically, I was in Ottawa but mentally I was in ancient Persia, thinking about the road and its network. It was part of an amazing matrix of physical roads, but also part of a socio-cultural and politicoeconomic network that the conquerors and statesmen of the Achaemenids had created and maintained for more than two centuries. Just as I feel safe on walkways in Ottawa through the park, by the river, in the woods and in remote and quiet places, I could imagine travelers on the “royal roads” feeling safe as they travelled and also when, every so often, they took a break in one of the rest areas, without worrying for their own safety or the security of the valuable commodities that each traveler must have been carrying with them to trade in other corners of the civitas. Thinking about the working of the Achaemenids’ theater built based on this ethos, I imagined myself as a citizen, or rather as a subject of this polity, and asked whether I could have felt satisfaction, achievement, and serenity, or whether the desires of my heart, the wants of my curious mind, and the spiritual hunger of my soul could have been materialized? Indeed, I felt it was so. I could take warmth in knowing that the civitas was committed to establishment of “Happiness for Mankind” (siyati…martiyahya), which includes me, of course. I could imagine myself going to the gathering to welcome Cyrus after his victory over Babylon, listening to his pledges and feeling my security, welfare, and aspirations were taken seriously. I could be satisfied that my personal fate and faith were important for the polity and that I was guaranteed the right to worship my own god in my own way. I could see myself as a member of one of the regions of Media, Elam, Parthia, Areia, Bactria, Sogdiana,

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Chorasmia, Drangiana, Arachosia, Sattagydia, Gandara, India, Saca, Babylonia, Assyria, Arabia, Egypt, Armenia, Cappadocia, Sardis, Ionia, and Scythians, as listed in the inscription from Darius’s tomb from Naqsh-i Rustam. I could see myself included in Darius’s statement: “By the favour of Ahura Mazda these are the countries which I seized outside Persia; I ruled over them; they bore me tribute; what was said to them by me, that they did; my law that held them in respect” (cited from Kuhrt 2013: 512). I am walking on a road where security is guaranteed, and my welfare awaits me in the rest area ahead of me every 39 km or 24 miles. I walk with pride and hope, because the Achaemenids foster governance that offers me individual and collective recognition and friendship and offers me the opportunity to participate in reverence and glory of the totality of the civitates.

Sources Cited Amin, Samir. 1989. Eurocentrism. Translated from the French by Russell Moore. New York: Monthly Review Press. Badi, Amir Mehdi. 1991. Les Grecs Et Les Barbares. Paris: Librairie Orientaliste Paul Geuthner, 4 Vol. Beiner, Ronald. 2011. Civil Religion: A Dialogue in the History of Political Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bozeman, Adda B. 2017. Politics and Culture in International History; from the Ancient Near East to the Opening of the Modern Age, 2nd ed. New York: Routledge. Briant, Pierre. 1378/2008. Emperatoriye Hachamaneshi [Achaemenid Empire]. Vols. 2, Translated from the French into Persian by Nahid Foroughan. Tehran: Entesharat-e Farzan. Briant, Pierre. 2002. From Cyrus to Alexander: A History of the Persian Empire. Translated from the French by Peter T. Daniels. Winona Lake, Indiana: Eisenbrauns. Cameron, George G. 1948. Persepolis Treasury Tablets. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Cornford, F.M. 1957. From Religion to Philosophy; a Study of the Origin of Western Speculation. New York: Harper and Row, Publishers. Ehtesham, Morteza. 1355/1976. Iran dar Zaman Hakhamaneshi (Iran during the Achaemenids). Tehran: Sherkat Sahami Ketabhaye Jibi. Evans, J. A. S. 1978. “What Happened to Croesus?” The Classical Journal 74 (October): 34–40.

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Frankfort, H. et. al. 1977. The Intellectual Adventure of Ancient Man: An Essay on Speculative Thought in the Ancient Near East. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, First Phoenix Edition. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. 2001. The Philosophy of History. Prefaces by Charles Hegel and Translated by J. Sibree. Kitchener. Canada: Batoche Books. Henkelman, Wouter F. M. 2008. The Other Gods Who Are: Studies in ElamiteIranian Acculturation based on the Persepolis Fortification Texts. Leiden: Peeters. Herodotus. 1988. The History of Herodotus. Translated by David Grene. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Kuhrt, Leslie. 2013. The Persian Empire: A Corpus of Sources from the Achaemenid Period. London, UK: Routledge. Kurke, Leslie. 1999. Coin, Bodies, Games and Gold; the Politics of Meaning in Archaic Greek. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Lincoln, Bruce. 2012. Happiness for Mankind: Achaemenian Religion and the Imperial Project. Louvain: Peeters. Mashkoor, Javad. 1347/1968. Tarikh Ejtema‘i Iran dar Ahd Bastaan (Iranian Social History in Ancient Era). Tehran: Daneshsaraye ‘Aali. Mojtabaei, Fatollah. 1352/1972. Shahr Zeebaye Aflatoon va Shahi Armani dar Iran Bastan (Platonic Ideal City and Ideal Kingship in Ancient Iran). Tehran: Entesharat Anjoman Farhang Iran Bastan. Panoussi, Estiphan. 1356. Ta’seer-r Farhang va Jahanbini-ye Irani bar Aflaton (The Influence of Persian Culture and Worldview on Plato). Tehran: Anjoman-e Hekmat-o Falsafe. Poolos, Jamie. 2008. Ancient World Leaders: Darius the Great. New York: Chelsea House Publishers. Rajaee, Farhang. 1385/2006. Tahavol-e Andishe-ye Siyasi dar Sharq-e Bastan (The Development of Political Thought in Ancient East). Tehran: Ghoomes Publishing Company Ltd, third and revised printing. Shaked, Shaul. 1987. “Aramaic,” Encyclopedia Iranica. New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul, pp. 250–261. Taylor, Charles. 2004. Modern Social Imaginaries. Durham: Duke University Press. Vakili, Sherwin. 1390/2011. Dariush-e Dadgar; Nazm-e Hakhamanishi va Zohur Man-e Parsi (The Just Darius; Achaemenid Order and the Emergence of the Persian I). Tehran: Nashr-e Shour Afarin. Xenophon. 1914. Cyropaedia. Translated from the Greek by Walter Miller. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

CHAPTER 6

The Mughals: a Civitas of Divine-Transcendence

The Mughals infused the Indian, Persian, Turkic, Afghan, and Arab cultures to the point of perfection. When I faced the magnificent Taj Mahal, the shrine of love, I did not cry; it was my heart that caused the non-stop sobbing due to of heartening joy. Anonymous

My second example of a civitas that facilitated presence in the political of a developing and dynamic civitas embodies the worldview of divinetranscendence. This worldview centers on the belief in one, and only one, deity. This deity has created the totality of being, has set things in motion, and holds humanity accountable for its actions on Earth. There are ample historical examples to choose from, but I have chosen to offer a portrait of the Muslim civitas of the Mughals (1526–1857). This is not only for the practical reason of my prior knowledge of it, but more so because this civitas created a life worth narrating in the context of a very powerful divine-transcendence worldview: India, a land of multiple gods, and even multiple religions. The Achaemenids worked within the existing intellectual and moral framework and one could even say the same ideological outlook as before: as we saw in the previous chapter, Darius insisted on preserving the old order, even legitimating his new rule based on it. The Mughals had a dual task of establishing a new material order as well as formulating an intellectual and ideological ethos that would legitimate such an order, in the face of rival ideologies and age-old cosmological © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 F. Rajaee, Presence and the Political, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59487-9_6

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worldview of divine-immanence. They rose to the challenge and created a civitas that at its peak was the richest and the most glamorous polity on the face of Earth. The founder came from the Timurids (1370–1507) of the Central Asian Steppes, a people who called their homeland “Mogholestan” (the Land of the Mongols), hence the name Mughals. They based their world on a western religion, Islam. This new religion was born in 610 when Abu al-Qasim Muhammad ibn Abdullah (570–632) claimed he received revelation to act as a prophet. The revelations continued coming until 632 and formed a system of thought that claimed to be the last and the most complete version of the previously revealed Abrahamic religions. It was a new reaffirmation of the worldview of divine-transcendence, that considers an all-powerful divine force as operating beyond existence and causes life itself and the world, creating everything ex nihilo. This omnipotent and omnipresent God is an abstract Being, “Who created the heavens and the earth and whatever is between them in six days; then He established Himself above the Throne” (The Qur’an 32: 4). The newly revealed message affirmed the exclusive authority of the one God, who “is the First, and the Last, and the Manifest and the Hidden” (Ibid. 57: 3).1 In other words, while Judaism and Christianity enlightened humanity about the transcendent God, Islam emphatically and categorically insisted on the sole authority of that one God. The gravest unforgivable sin in Islam is assigning deity to anything or anyone other than the supreme God. This was an empowering message because according to Islam, God has ninety-nine attributes, all of which, except for five, empower human beings. The five outliers are either neutral or negative from human perspective: the afflicter, the destroyer, the abaser, the avenger, and the compeller. God’s most significant attribute is justice. Considering how 1 In fact, verses 2–5 are worth citing in full:

Whatever is in the heavens and the earth glorifies God; and He is the Mighty, the Wise. His is the kingdom of the heavens and the earth; He gives life, He causes death; and He has power over all things. He is the First and the Last, and the Manifest and the Hidden, and He knows all things full well. It is He, who created the heavens and earth in six periods and then established Himself on the Throne. He knows what enters the earth and what comes out of it, and what comes down from heaven and what goes up into it. And He is with you wherever you may be. And God sees all that you do. His is the kingdom of the heavens and the earth; and to God are all affairs referred.

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the Qur’an declares humanity as God’s “vicegerent on earth” (Ibid. 2: 30) and dictates its raison d’être as complete attunement to God’s will, human beings are meant not just to live according to the principles of justice but also to embody them. To be a Muslim means to submit to the idea of absolute transcendent divinity and to act accordingly. The notion of jihad (to strive) describes acting or performing Muslim/human in a continuous fashion. Thus, a follower of Islam is both a Muslim (the person who submits to “the right thing”) and Mujahid (the person who strives to do “the right thing, rightly”). Jihad or striving is not an easy task. In striving to deal with oneself and submit to the right thing (the greater jihad), one should manifest righteousness, and in striving to deal with others or to do things rightly in the world (lesser jihad) one should manifest prudence, enacting it in a measured way, guided by equity and fa. In other words, performing human first and foremost is toward oneself, while facing one’s maker, and that amounts to submission to the provisions of justice understood as righteousness. The Qur’an explicitly reminds humanity that “Indeed, the most noble of you in the sight of God is the most righteous of you” (Ibid. 49: 13). Righteousness forms the core of this worldview and as such defines the content of the presence, the parameters of ethos, and main features of the theater in the emerging Muslim civilizations, colored by time and place in each case. In the case of performing Muslim/human when facing others, the Qur’an demands “when thou have to judge, judge between them with fairness and equity: verily, God knows those who act fairly and in equitably” (Ibid. 5: 42), or “And [in all your dealings] give full measure and weight, with fairness equity” (Ibid. 6: 152). Here “righteousness” means to do justice. That process began with the first revelation in 610, but as a sociopolitical system, entailing the creation of a community, it began in earnest when Muhammad erected a polity based on this exclusive monotheism in 622. This polity relied on Islam’s specific dictates. Absolute submission to or faith in the one God (Tawhid) is to be expressed verbally and displayed in practice. Thus, it is the duty of every submitter, regardless of position and social rank to express it in speech (uttering the Oneness, Shahada) and display Oneness in one’s behavior (by praying, Salat; paying taxes, Zakat; fasting, swam; and pilgrimage, hajj ), which together form the famous five pillars of Islam. One corollary feature of this emphasis on practice is that it makes Islam a religion of orthopraxy, unlike, for instance, Christianity, which emphasizes orthodoxy.

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How various civitates perform the five pillars in practice, of course takes on temporal and spatial accent and color. This is the reason I have used the plural form of civitas because Muslims produced civilizations, not once but twice in their history. The first epoch could be termed Arabesque, because Arabic language and modes were the vernacular of the civilization production, with the core states forming in Baghdad for the Abbasids (750–1258), Cairo for the Fatimids (909–1171), and Cordoba for the Moors (756–1086). In the second phase, Muslim civilization production geographically shifted eastward and in terms of the vernacular, it took on a Persianate color, because Persian language and ways formed and shaped the three civitates, even though the ruling elite were Turks, once again in the three centers of Istanbul for the Ottomans (1281–1924), Isfahan for the Safavids (1501–1732), and Delhi for the Mughals. All six civitates experienced amazing and dynamic vitality. What is worth noting is that in each of these six, it was the working together of presence, ethos, and theater that made the comprehensive, concomitant, and convivial production of order, welfare, imagination, education, society, and arts possible. This combined production made their unique presence in the political possible. What form did presence, ethos, and theater take under the Mughals dominance? This is the main question guiding me in the present chapter.

Presence: Submitter to Godly Life; Babur and Akbar The first submitter to Islam who emerged as a conqueror of the Indian continent with a vision was Zahir’d-din Muhammad, Padishah Ghazi Babur (1483–1530), who came from the city of Andijan in the Ferghana Valley in what is now Uzbekistan. No wonder he earned the title “kingwarrior” (Padishah Ghazi), now part of his historical appellation and reputation, a notion very close to my appellation for such heroes, a conqueror with a vision. Like Cyrus in the example of Iran, he inherited the local kingdom from his father in 1494 sometime during the 12th year of his life (Early 2003: 5). There is little information about his early childhood or his early education. Knowledge of Babur’s life from the time he assumed the role of the king until his death is based on a massive, detailed, and charming memoir of over 500 pages entitled Babur Nama (the Book of Babur, or as rendered by others, the Babur’s Memoir), which he penned himself

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(rather than dictating it, as was customary for kings). He wrote it “in his native language of Turki, later known in Europe as Chaghatai Turkish” (Dale 2018: 3), and its contents have been verified and cross-referenced by later biographers and historians. It is considered a valuable source, authoritative enough to serve as a source for writing “a commentary on Babur’s autobiography and poetry” (Ibid.: 4) based on it. Here, I read the Persian translation of the text, which was rendered during the rule of the third Mughal king, Abu‘l-Fath Jalal-ud-Din Muhammad Akbar (1542–1605), famous as Akbar the Great, and also the English translation from the Turkish (published in 1922). The book is not an ordinary diary of events or even personal incidents, but much more. The content displays the pen of an acute surveyor of events, people, and the environment in detail, nuanced, and revelatory style. The text appeared to me as a sophisticated and documented ethnography as well. His account of the environment, for example, includes geographical distances, natural habitats, fauna, flora, human geography, including human industry such as systems of irrigation. They are not just personal impressions but also reference reputable works of culture and history in the author’s own time (Babur 1922: see, e.g., 479 or 520). One of his biographers captures the contents of the memoir in the following passage, which offers a good summary of the author’s convictions as well: “a carefully conceived, legitimizing self-presentation of a Turco-Mongol aristocrat who is a knowledgeable, accomplished writer and a committed Sunni Muslim who rules according to accepted Islamic administrative norms” (Dale 2004: 41). The memoir covers the Babur’s complete career: the first section begins from the time he assumed power after his father’s death until the time he fled his hometown for Kabul in 1494; the second covers the period from his arrival there up to 1526, when he conquered India and initiated the creation of the Mughal civitas; and the third section covers his career from his settlement in India until his death in 1530. He begins the memoir with the following sentence: “In the month of Ramazan of the year 899 [1494] and the twelfth year of my life, I became the ruler in the country of Ferghana” (Babur 1922: 1). The first section mostly narrates his consolidation of power in the face of competing rivals, uncles, and cousins. He initiated expeditions for external conquest beyond the original domain in this period, but they were not very successful. Here, I will focus on the second and third phases, the period in which he extended his domain toward the West, i.e., the first capital of his ancestor Timur Gurkani (1336–1405, known in the West as Tamerlane), the city

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of Samarkand, and in the South Delhi, again the city that the Timurid ruler had captured in 1398. Assuming power so young, one could claim he was schooled in the battleground of life and had to learn fast. The fact that he had a voracious appetite for learning, conquest, and glory, facilitated his learning curve. As described above, both his father and Babur longed to revitalize the lost domain of the Mongolian ruler Tamerlane, whom they claimed as their ancestor. The big prizes were Samarkand, which Babur called “the throne of our forefathers” (Ibid.: 299), and the Indian subcontinent, “that had long been dependencies of the Turk” (Ibid.: 384–385). In a way, the first school of life for Babur was his struggle to secure his position as his father’s successor in the face of his uncles’ challenges to his authority. He managed to do so successfully, showing prudence and tenacity. As to his role as “a conqueror with a vision” of the Mughals’ civitas, E. M. Forster (1879–1970), the English novelist and essayist, has made an insightful summation of Babur’s professional life as “a career that was not only successful but artistic” (Cited in Dale 2004: 13). I will concentrate on his conquest of Samarkand, which was ultimately not entirely successful, and his complete success in capturing India and making it his historical home. In terms of his artistic achievements, he was a literary man, which can be easily seen from the quality of his writing, his poetry, and his taste for public gardens, which shows his appreciation for the finer aspects of public life. As his biographers put it, “he constantly and lovingly discusses the planning and construction of gardens, to which he gave such evocative names as: The Garden of Rest, the Gold-Scattering Garden, the Lotus Garden, and the Garden of the Eight Paradises. It is in these gardens he can be most frequently seen and, in many respects, most readily understood” (Ibid.: 2). Babur’s attempt to capture Samarkand began immediately after he assumed power, but he made many subsequent attempts, in 1494, 1497, and 1500, before finally giving up after taking over Kabul in 1504. The capture of Kabul came after “five months of siege” (Babur 1922: 18), and Babur describes it thus: “It was in the last ten days of the Second Rabi‘ [October 1504] that without a fight, without an effort, by Almighty God’s bounty and mercy, I obtained and made subject to me Kabul and Ghazni and their dependent districts” (Ibid.: 199). In Afghanistan, he declared himself Padeshah (The Guardian King), and renewed his campaign to capture Samarkand, but his efforts were frustrated repeatedly by the Uzbeks. Repeatedly, he captured it, but then lost it again

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the moment he turned his attention to other matters. As he states, “I took Samarkand in 917 [October 1511]” (Ibid.: 277), only to lose it soon again to the Uzbeks. Forster summarized his constant struggle and frustration before moving to Kabul about Samarkand: “[A]gain he conquered, lost, conquered and lost forever Ferghana and Samarkand. Not until he was twenty-one and had taken to drink, did the true direction of his destiny appear; moving southward” (cited in Dale 2004: 13). Capturing Kabul gave him a taste of real victory, despite his various frustrating attempts at capturing Samarkand, and this made him turn toward Delhi. In fact, the Uzbeks had made his life so difficult that he was seeking refuge. His long-time dream of recapturing “dependencies of the Turk” in the South encouraged him to see India as an opportunity “to get away from the ever-menacing Uzbeks” (Early 2003: 13). This is not to say, however, that his Indian conquest was easily achieved. It began in 1519, but it took him seven years and five tries before he realized his wish in the Battle of Banipat on April 21, 1526. Beyond ancestral claims, there were many reasons he turned to India. He explicitly marked some of these in his diary, such as India being an economic gold mine and offering strategic advantages: “The country of Hindustan [India], is extensive, full of men, and full of produce. On the east, south and even on the west, it ends at its great enclosing ocean…. Pleasant things of Hindustan are that it is a large country and has masses of gold and silver…. [And] another good thing in Hindustan is that it has unnumbered and endless workmen of every kind” (Babur 1922: 480, 519, and 520). He also comments on the wealth of India and he offers a table listing resources from various regions (Ibid.: 521), which have been estimated by economic historians to have been worth more than four million pounds in 1526 (Ibid.: footnote in 520). Officially, he emphasizes the ancestral ownership of the region in the March 3, 1519, entry of his memoir: People were always saying, “It could do no harm to send an envoy, for peace’s sake, to countries that once depended on the Turk.” Accordingly, on Thursday the 1st of Rabi‘ul-Awwal, Mulla Murshid was appointed to go to Ibrahim [the ruler of India at the time]…. and asked for the countries which from of old had been the dependencies of the Turks…. and he came back to Kabul a few months later without bringing a reply. (Ibid.: 384–385)

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He did not make the final decision lightly, however. He patiently waited for the right time, when he had secured the consent of his councils, which he consulted regularly, particularly about major decisions such as this (Ibid.: 478). At the time of actual implementing the decision, though, he still took gradual steps. For example, before departing from Kabul, for what turned out to be the last time, on Friday, November 17, 1525, he had already made four smaller invasions of India, including his capture of Lahore in 1524, where he appointed “his own men to administer the city and nearby fortresses” (Dale 2004: 321). The Battle of Panipat on April 21, 1526 was the final effort to capture the Indian capital of Agra. Babur’s army quickly overcame the enemy forces. In Babur’s biographer’s words, “By noon the battle was won, Ibrahim [the ruler of Delhi] was dead, and the field was littered with an estimated 15–16,000 corpses” (Ibid.: 330). In three weeks, Babur arrived victoriously at Delhi and turned it into the seat of power of the new polity and later the Mughals’ civitas. As Babur notes, “I entered Agra at the Afternoon Prayer of Thursday (Rajab 28th) and dismounted at the mansion [manzil] of Sultan Ibrahim” (Babur 1922: 478). What made the battle so impressive is that the enemy forces were estimated at 100,000 soldiers, while Babur’s was estimated at 12,000. For me, the greatest indication of Babur as a conqueror with a vision relates to his first act after the victory, which was not to avenge himself against the enemy, punishing adversaries or slaughtering challengers, but to lay out a garden, now known as the Ram Bagh (the corrupt version of “Aaraam Bagh,” meaning the Garden of Rest), located five kilometers northeast of the Taj Mahal, by the Yamuna River. It still stands beautiful today and has kept its charm, although it is not well kept. Of course, I was not surprised that a recent biography of Babur is entitled The Garden of the Eight Paradises (2004), even though I feel the title “the Gardener of Paradise” would have been more fitting. Those who have tried to capture his character in a few words have focused on terms like appreciative of natural beauty, cultured, adventurous, and magnanimous to describe him. Martim Afonso de Sousa (1490–1564), the Portuguese explorer and colonial administrator who observed Babur and engaged with him in person, summarized Babur’s character with these words: “This [Babur] is naturally a conqueror, and of great Heart, and the most indefatigable man that I’ve ever seen, and an extraordinary great lord” (cited in Alam and Subramanyam 2012: 34). I think the summation of Scottish Orientalist and historian of medieval India William Erskine (1773–1852), who

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produced the first biography of Babur in 1864, is more to the point and both an accurate and flattering summation of his character: Zahir’d-din Muhammad Babur was undoubtedly one of the most illustrious men of his age, one of the most eminent and accomplished princes that ever adorned as Asiatic throne…In his activity of mind, in the gay equanimity and unbroken spirit with which he bore the extremes of good and bad fortune, in the possession of the manly and social virtues, in his love of letters and his success in the cultivation of them, we shall probably find no other Asiatic prince who can justify be placed beside him. (Cited in Babur 1922: 715–716)

When it comes to identifying a statesman with a vision in the political of the Mughals’ civitas, the person that immediately comes to mind is Akbar the Great. His father was the second king of the Mughal civitas, Nasir-ud-Din Muh.ammad Humayun (1508–1556), and his mother Hamida Banu Begum (c. 1527–1604) was from a scholarly Persian family. Part of Akbar’s name means “the glory of religion” (Jalalud-Din), and what a glory he was! A reliable source for my portrait of this great statesman is Akbar Namah, a work by Abulfazl ‘Allami of Agra (1551–1602). Abulfazl2 was a military leader, a statesman and a chief minister. Abulfazl joined the Mughal court in 1574 and for a quarter of a century was a secretary and a friend who “served as Akbar’s spokesman par excellence, shaping, articulating, and immortalizing the ideals espoused by the emperor, a circumstance greatly facilitated by the coincidence of the two men’s political and religious views” (Encyclopedia Iranica). In describing Abulfazl’s classic work, the American historian Marshal Hodgson (1922–1968) writes: “The most consistent and certainly the grandest literary expression of the intellectual mood at Akbar’s court is the Akbar Namah” (1974, Volume 3: 73). Part of Abulfazl’s success in this venture was due to the fact that he “tried to see history and worldly civilization generally under the categories of unitive mystical thought” (Ibid.), which was very close to Akbar’s view of civility and civilization. But who was Akbar?

2 Although his works in the bibliography has been listed under ‘Allami, since he is more known with his first name in the historical records, I have used his first name Abulfazl throughout this text as well.

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Like his grandfather Babur, Akbar succeeded to the throne at a young age, when he was thirteen. By the time of his death in 1605, however, he had expanded the Mughals’ civitas to most of the north, central, and western sections of the Indian subcontinent. Although I will concentrate on Akbar as a statesman with a vision, he was also engaged in ongoing conquest. The unification of the Indian subcontinent took place in stages. The first campaign (1561–1576) focused on the central region of the continent; the second (1583–1595) took him to the northern region; and the third (1597–1601) took him toward the Deccan region. But even before these phases, he had to establish his own authority. Because his father, the second Mughal king, was engaged in a bitter fight with some local rulers, Akbar’s uncles reared him in Kabul, where he learned to hunt and acquired the art of chivalry. There is no record that he ever attended any school, but he managed to make himself literate later in life. He developed an enormous appetite for reading books; he had people read for him every night. He read or heard The Babur Nama, his grandfather’s memoir, and must have been both impressed and influenced by its charm, wit, and insights. Before assuming the role of monarch, he was appointed regent in the region of Ghazni (one of the southern provinces of Afghanistan today). When his father considered it safe for him to join the court, he found him a good mentor. Bairam Khan (1501–1561), a loyal, powerful, and skillful general in the military of the Mughal court who had joined Akbar’s grandfather force at the age of 16 was “appointed by Humayun [as the] tutor of his son Akbar” (Abulfazl 1975: 24). Not only did he tutor Akbar, but he also became his regent, following Akbar’s nominal accession to power on February 14, 1556. Within a few months, Bairam Khan consulted Akbar and other major overlords of the Mughal polity to discuss attacking the rebels and retaking Delhi, but the chiefs disagreed. He managed to convince the young king to go forward, however, and on November 5, 1556, Akbar retook Delhi in the same place as his grandfather had done, hence the event has been called the “the Second Battle of Panipat” (Chandra 2007: 227). From this point onward, he gradually emerged as his own person, and by 1560, he was the central authority of the newly emerging Mughals’ civitas. From a very young age, he displayed the mental disposition and tendencies that made him deserve the role I have assigned to him, the initiator of the Mughals’ civitas. As an example of this disposition, I think of his declaration of “the prohibition against making slaves of prisoners taken in war” (Abulfazl 1975: 24), which indicates his respect for human

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dignity, including that of the enemy. Indeed, one easily cast him as a person, a thinker, and a statesman with a broad vision of infusion. He infused military organization with civilian administration; the sacred with the profane; and the abstract theological narrative of religion with the dryness and legalism of jurisprudence. I will deal with this moderate and inclusive approach later when I examine the Mughals’ ethos, but for now I will focus on some of his major policies of infusion as a statesman and civilization maker. By of way introducing his broad policies, I remind the reader that Akbar soon found himself in a world dominated by Indian, Iranian, Muslim, and even European mores, traditions, and values as expressed in the various languages of Sanskrit, Persian, Urdu, Arabic, Greek, and Latin, during his long rule from 1556 to 1605, each representing their own respective communities. In other words, as we saw in part one of this book, languages are part of the constitutive element of individual as well as group identity and should be used to ensure the rights and privileges of those who speak them. For example, as I have alluded to above and will elaborate later, in a polity whose official ethos is based on the teaching of Islam, people of other faiths who do not speak the languages of Muslims could have been assigned lesser privileges or legal status and provisions. Akbar, however, supported them all equally, even though as mentioned before, during the era of the second round of Muslim civilization production (approximately the sixteenth–nineteenth century), Persian became the lingua franca of the Muslim world. Indeed, the first task of the civilizing task of Akbar included eliminating those provisions that might compromise a sense of fairness and further instituting provisions that enhanced a sense of belonging in and loyalty to the new civitas. I will enumerate some of them. Akbar’s first civilizing task was to eliminate the state tax system that restricted access to places of worship. As depicted by Abul Abulfazl, “It was an old standing custom for the rulers of Hindustan to exact contributions, according to their respective means, from the pilgrims who visited the holy shrines…. An order was accordingly issued abolishing it throughout his dominions” (Ibid.: 30). A year later, he made an even more radical decision. He abolished the special taxes on non-Muslim minorities that had been part of the Muslim legal code for centuries. Again in Abulfazl’s words: “One of the munificent acts of the King of kings at the beginning of this the ninth year of his reign was signing the forgiveness of the jizya, which, in a country so extensive as Hindustan,

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amounted to an immense sum” (Ibid.: 31/p. 203 of the volume two of the original Persian). In terms of broader policies of infusion, however, Akbar’s first notable achievement was to combine conquest with statesmanship by combining civilian and military reforms. He created what is known as the Mansabdari system, a ranking system of between thirty and sixty “grades” of position within the military and civil machinery. Hodgson offers a precise description of the system: “a very flexible system of graded rankings of office holders, mansabdars, in a bureaucracy. Each officer was assigned, as mansabdar, the revenue of lands which (by prior assessment) were ascertained to yield a certain amount, at which his salary was fixed” (1974: Volume 3: 64). Like the king himself, a mansabdar was both a conqueror and a statesman, or, to put it differently, an officer of both security and sustenance. According to Abulfazl, the main duty of the monarch was “continually attentive to the health of the body politics and applying remedies to the several diseases thereof” (1873: ii). Each mansabdar had the same duty in his assigned region. It is important to note that unlike in the feudal system of Europe, no mansab (position) was permanent or hereditary, and thus the office holder could be deprived of the privileges if he failed in his task or misused his authority. I like to highlight this interesting proviso of removal from office if necessary. To me, it guaranteed the fairness of the system: nothing could be taken for granted, one was subject to review and accountability. Further, by establishing flexible prior assessments of the potential agricultural yield of the land, some degree of non-subjectivity was infused in the system. That flexibility in the system applied to all areas of the economic and administrative apparatus of the civitas. One specific policy that captured my attention as an indicator of Akbar’s care for objectivity was his initiation of the census. He instituted it thus in 1581: “An Imperial mandate was issued directing the jagirdars [royally gifted big land cultivators], shikkdars [in charge of law and order], and darogahs [inspectors] throughout the Empire to draw up, village by village, lists of all the inhabitants, specifying their names and occupations; and that these lists should all be collected together” (Ibid.: 64). Two years later (1583), possibly because of the census, Akbar turned his attention to administrative reform. As Abulfazl reports: “At the beginning of this year, His Majesty directed his attention to an improvement of the administration of his territories and passed new laws for the management of civil and revenue business” (Ibid.: 65). Part of the administrative reform focused

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on agrarian lands, and provisions were instituted to encourage farmers to cultivate lands that in turn increased the public treasury. Abulfazl reports as follows: For lands which had lain waste four years, they were to receive a deduction of one-half for the first year, for the second year one-quarter, and for the third year they were to-pay according to established rule. For lands which had lain untilled for two years they were to receive a deduction of one-fourth for the first year. For uncultivated lands, they were to receive a small allowance of grain, so as to make the lands capable of yielding revenue. When advances were made for the assistance of poor cultivators, engagements were to be taken from men of respectability, and part was to be repaid at the spring harvest, part at the autumnal harvest. By these arrangements, the country would in a short period become cultivated, the raiyats [farmers] would be cultivated, and the treasury flourishing. (Abulfazl 1975: 66)

Part of the same administrative reform focused on finance and revenue system. In 1582–1583, Akbar appointed a veteran financial administrator, Raja Todarmal (1500–1589), who had substantial experience in this area even within the rival kingdom of Sher Shah Suri (1486–1545) in Northern India. His job was to create a system for calculation of revenue, which he called the “Dahsala (ten year)” system (Moosvi 2008: Chapter 8). It was a system that took local prices into account as well as categorizing and grouping areas with similar productivity as part of the assessment framework. The primary objective was the creation of objective and general standards. If flood or drought negatively affected productivity, farmers and peasants would receive remissions (Chandra 2007: 234–236). Finally, part of the administrative infusion or reform relates to the bureaucratic structure delivering services that the Mughals’ polity required for offering governance to the people. According to Abulfazl, that system comprised of “member of nobility, helpers, companions and servants,” who collectively preserved the polity because, “the body politic depends on the proper formation” of these four groups (1873 Volume 1: viii). A more detailed account of the fourfold division is enumerated as follows: The nobles of state, who in reliance on their position lead everything to a happy issue. Illuminating the battlefield with the halo of devotedness,

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they make no account of their lives. These fortunate courtiers resemble fire, being ardent in devotion, and consuming in dealing with foes…. The assistants of rectory, the collectors and those entrusted with income and expenditure, who in the administration resemble wind, at times a heat rejoicing breeze, at other times a hot, pestilential blast…. The companions of the king, who are the ornaments of the court by the light of their wisdom, the ray of their sharp sidedness, their knowledge of the time, their intimate acquaintance with human nature, their frankness, and polite address…. Wisely, fettering ambition on the battlefield of the world, they extinguish the sparks of wrath by the rain of their wisdom; whence they resemble water in the affairs of the body political…. The servants, who at court perform the duties about the kind. They occupy in the system of the State the position of earth. (Ibid.: vi–vii, emphasis in the original)

The members of the first rank formed the elite of the society, loyal to royalty and devoting their life, property, faith, and personal honor for the preservation of the civitas, each of its member was called vakil (which means a deputy in relation to the king); members of the second rank were the administrators and “in reality book keepers” of the civitas, “whose head is vazir [minister]” and his institution was “called divan [bureaucracy]”; members of the third group offered expertise councils to the King of Kings not only for the welfare of the polity but also helped in “putting the welfare of mankind upon a sound basis”; and the members of the final rank delivered various mundane services. In terms of cultural and economic policies, Akbar also initiated interesting reforms of infusion, but I will deal with the former in the next section and with the latter later in my discussion of the Mughals’ “theater.” As a way of ending the discussion here, I would offer a summary of the infused portrait of Akbar in the historiography of medieval India. I call it an “infused” portrait, because the image that has emerged combines icons in mores and legacies of Persia with mystical interpretations of Islam, Hinduism, and even those of Greek world (Donde 2016). Think about this combination: Akbar as an “ideal king,” in the sense understood in the ancient Iran with a halo of light around his head (as elaborated by Ferdowsi in the Shahnama); a humanist king modeled after “the perfect being” (Ensan-e Kamel ), depicted in the Sufi literature in the works of masters like the poet Abd ar-Rahman Jami (1414–1498), who wrote under the patronage of Akbar’s ancestral dynasty, the Timurid; a sacred king emulating the character of Alexander the Great, as depicted in the Iskandernama (Romance of Alexander) by the Iranian romantic poet

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Jamal ad-D¯ın Nizami Ganjavi (1141–1209); and finally a god-king figure as portrayed in Sanskrit texts that depict the Hindu god Vishnu as a king. The infused portrait of Akbar mirrors the ethos, social imaginary, and rules of the game that he initiated, formulated, and helped institutionalize for future generations.

Ethos: Divine Religion, Universal Conciliation, Welfare of Mankind As I mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, the Mughals came from a region that had been converted to Islam centuries before they made their way to the Indian subcontinent. As such, the framework for their ethos, social imaginary, and their moral order was Islam. Even though there has been a tendency among Muslims to turn their religion into a state religion at the behest of power and its struggle for dominance, the Mughals succeeded in offering a version of Islam that manifested more as an official religion than a state religion. Like that of the Achaemenids’ reading of the holy Aryan texts, their reading of the holy message in Islam was such that it accommodated other monotheistic and non-monotheistic religions such as Christianity, Hinduism, and Buddhism. Indeed, the Mughals’ ethos could be called “infused universalism,” which did not come about easily. Both Akbar and his advisor Abulfazl had the temperament for it, but they also worked hard first to develop it and more importantly to gain acceptance for it. For example, starting in 1575, “Akbar began convening weekly discussions, with a wide variety of religious participants, in his house of devotion (‘ebadat-khana). Abulfazl figured prominently in these discussions” (Encyclopedia Iranica). Since “Akbar was moved by the more universal appeal” (Hodgson 1974: 71), soon he endorsed a narrative of his own religion of Islam that accommodated everyone, including materialists. I should mention that he had tried to legitimate his rule by appealing to a juristic reading of the Qur’an but was disillusioned by the experience. As Hodgson writes, “Throughout his reign, but especially after his experiment with the Shar‘i legitimation in 1580, the many reforms that he favored and even tried to impose by law were such as expressed respect for dignity of living beings, whether such respect was specially called for in the Shri‘ah or not ” (Ibid.: 71, italic added). It is worth citing in full Abulfazl’s account of the events of that year:

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When the capital was illumined by the return of the Kingly presence, the old regulations came again into operation, and the house of devotion [‘ebadat khana] shone resplendent on Friday nights with the light of holy minds…. Sufis, doctors, preachers, lawyers, Sunnis, Shi‘as, Brahmans, Jains, Buddhists, Charvaka, Christians, Jews, Zoroastrians, and learned men of every belief, were gathered together in the royal assembly, and were filled with delight. Each one fearlessly brought forward his assertions and arguments, and the disputations and contentions were long and heated. Every sect, in its vanity and conceit, attacked and endeavoured to refute the statements of their antagonists…. The black-hearted, mean-hearted, and the mean-spirited disputants shrank from this proposal, and answered only with angry words. This prejudice and violence greatly annoyed the kingly mind of the King of Kings, and, with great discrimination and enlightenment, he said: “Man’s outward profession and the mere letter of Muhammadanism, without a heartfelt conviction, can avail nothing. I have forced many Brahmans, by fear of my power, to adopt the religion of my ancestors; but now that my mind has been enlightened with beams of truth, I have become convinced that the dark clouds of conceit and the mist of self-opinion have gathered round you, and that not a step can be made in advance without the torch of proof. That course only can be beneficial which we select with clear judgment. To repeat the words of the Creed, to perform circumcision, or to lie prostrate on the ground from dread of kingly power, can avail nothing in the sight of God: ‘Obedience is not in prostration on the earth- Practise sincerity, for righteousness is not borne upon the brow.’” (1975: 62–64, italic in the original)

For me, the inclusion of the leaders of Charvaka school is significant and revealing, because they were materialists, or as the Sanskrit word conveys, “followers of the school of worldliness.” The royal court indeed treated all schools of thoughts equally. Akbar called his reading and understanding of the divine message “Din-i-Ilahi” (the Divine Religion). One consequential implication of this new approach was that it removes intermediary elements between the people and their Creator. In the case of Islam, which combined an extreme form of monotheism with orthopraxy, a class of learned scholars of law and jurisprudence emerged as a powerful and relatively conservative force within all Muslim societies. They are known with the generic name Ulama (scholars). In all the Muslim world, five schools of jurisprudence developed in the eighth and ninth century that still have legitimate

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authority. In the Mughals’ civitas, the Hanafi school enjoyed that status.3 Akbar had to establish that even though he tolerated this juridical class, the ultimate voice in matters related to the civitas resided with reason, whose guardianship was the duty solely of royal authority. This was set in a decision that lead to the issuing of a mahdar (a public attestation), declaring the following: Should therefore, in future a religious question arise, regarding which the opinions of the Mujtahids differ, and his majesty in his penetrating intellect and clear wisdom opts, for the benefit of the people and for the betterment of the administration of the country, any of the conflicting opinions and issues a decree to that effect, it would constitute a unanimously agreed opinion. Such a decree shall be binding on all the nobles and commons. Further, they agree that should his majesty think fit to declare one of the existing opinions as law which is not opposed to the injunctions of the Qur’an and is of real benefit to the people, it will be final and binding for everyone. Any opposition to such an order shall cause damnation in the world to come and suffer spiritual as well as worldly loss. (cited from Masud 2016: 42)

Many scholars, particularly contemporary Muslims affected by extremism, see this move as anti-Islamic, but this takes the mahdar completely out of context. The attestation makes the exercise of royal authority conditional upon extreme cases of deadlock among the scholars of jurisprudence. Further, it limits the authority of the king to making determinations for the “benefit of the people” and the interest of the polity, thus does not allow for arbitrary decisions. At the same time, an interesting fact about the document is that “Akbar or other kings never invoked the document” (Ibid.). In other words, there is a substantial

3 There are four Sunni and one Shi‘a schools of Jurisprudence in the Muslim world. The Sunni schools are as follows: Hanafi, founded by Abu H . anifa al-Numan b. Thabit (c. 699–767) found in Afghanistan, the Balkans, Bangladesh, Central Asia, most of Egypt, India, Iraq, Pakistan, Russia Turkey; Maliki, founded by Malik bin Anas (711–795) found in Kuwait, North Africa, West Africa, the United Arab Emirates, and in Upper Egypt; Shafi‘i, founded by Abu Abdillah Muhammad ibn Idris al-Shafii (767–820) and found in Eastern Lower Egypt, Indonesia, Jordan, Kurdistan, Malaysia, Palestine, the Philippines, Singapore, Somalia, Thailand, and Yemen; and Hanbali, founded by Abu Abdillah Ah.mad Ibn Muh.ammad Ibn H . anbal (780–855) and found in Qatar, most of Saudi Arabia. The Shi‘i school is Jafari, founded by Ja‘far ibn Muh.ammad as.-S.¯adiq (700 or 702–765) and found in Bahrain, with most being in Iran and Pakistan.

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misreading of this amazing notion, which is beyond the scope of my work here, but suffice is to say that even its name is misunderstood. As Hodgson warns us, “The term din-i-Ilahi, ‘divine religion,’ by which the cult is now generally known, does not seem to have been used seriously in Akbar’s time” (1974, volume 3: 73n). Following regular discussions and debates, Akbar offered a way to understand religion that I think is consistent with the understanding of “exclusive monotheism” in Islam, which Hodgson correctly expresses as follows: a dedication “to a universalist outlook (tawhid-e elahi, ‘divine monotheism’) (Ibid.: 73). Abulfazl devoted “Ain 77” to this approach, which in its English rendition covers six pages (162–167). The phrase din-i-ilahi never appears. Insofar as the above passage about the public attestation is concerned, it declares Akbar “as the spiritual guide of the people” (Abulfazl 1873: 162). Abulfazl claims he acquiesced to this reluctantly, saying: “Why should I claim to guide men, before I myself am guided” (cited from Ibid.: 165). This may explain why the document was never used, but it did serve its main purpose, namely declaring that a legalistic interpretation of God’s intention cannot guide society toward a civitas, but instead authentic human effort guided by ethical and spiritual principles does so. Roychoudhuri has written an entire book on this topic, and in his thorough contextualization of the debate, he explains the approach thus: [T]he champions of other faiths were present propounded the Din-i-Ilahi in ten virtues: (1) Liberality and beneficence; (2) Forgiveness of the evildoer and repulsion of anger with mildness; (3) Abstinence from worldly desires; (4) Care of freedom from the bonds of the worldly existence and violence as well as accumulating precious stores for the future real and perpetual world; (5) Wisdom and devotion in the frequent meditation on the consequences of actions; (6) Strength of dexterous prudence in the desire of marvellous actions; (7) Soft voice, gentle words, pleasing speeches for everybody; (8) Good treatment with brethren, so that their will may have the precedence to our own; (9) A perfect alienation from creatures and a perfect attachment to the Supreme Being; [and] (10) Dedication of soul in the love of God and union with God the preserver of all. (1941: 279)

That combination of dedication represents the true meaning of tawhid-e elahi (divine monotheism), as Hodgson rightly corrected our understanding of din-i-Ilahi, and in line also with my description of this

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worldview as genuine belief in divine-transcendence. In such a belief, there is no place for intermediaries anyway, and apparent differences between Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, Christianity, Judaism, and even worldly religions disappear or become pale and negligible. In practical terms, embracing this universal approach would lead to what came to be known as the solh-i-kol (the universal peace or universal conciliation), which translated into embracing the diversity and multiplicity of languages including Persian, Turkish, Sanskrit, Urdu, and also others such as Bengali, Telugu (the Dravidian language), and yet more, for a total of fifteen major languages. Then also, it meant welcoming ethnic communities of various sorts, but above all, the working together of the multiple religions. These were not mere words or nice gestures. The mottos were supported by actual policies. Respect for languages not only meant that people spoke them freely, even though the lingua franca was Persian and even for a while Urdu, but texts from various languages were translated for use in the rich libraries that the royal court sponsored and institutionalized. “At Akbar’s court, translation into Persian (the language of polite civilization in Islamdom) was an important activity: works were translated from Turkish and Arabic and also from Indic languages, especially Sanskrit- whether of a religious coloring or not” (Hodgson 1974, Volume 3: 76). It was not a private affair in the court, but rather it was the product of “the Translation Bureau” (maktab khana) that “helped considerably to change the Muslim perception of Hinduism. The most remarkable production of this bureau were the translations of Mahabharata, the Ramayana and the Yuga Vashishta” (in Dara Shikuh 1998: iii, prefatory note by the publisher). I think these translations were part of what Hodgson poetically calls the Mughals’ policy of “conciliation” both with nature and with other human beings. He notes how Akbar encouraged cultivation in India and even nurtured plants and fruits which his garden-maker grandfather “Babur had complained [were absent or of] poor quality. Along with the cultivation of natural possibilities went the gentling of relations among human beings” (Hodgson 1974, Volume 3: 76). After Akbar, the same pattern of working together with other communities and among religions continued. To demonstrate this, I will turn to an interesting book entitled Majma’-ul Bahrein (the Confluence of the Two Seas) by Dara Shikuh (1615–1659), the oldest son of Shah Jahan (1592–1666), who was to replace him as a king, but was murdered by

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his brother who took power instead. The book is a treatise of comparative religions, showing how Islam and Hinduism follow the same truth, each in their own way, another example of Akbar’s notion of divine religion in operation. Section ten of the book is insightful and revealing for understanding the policy of conciliation. It is called “Discourse on the vision of God (royat )” and the author asserts at the beginning that all believers know that it is possible to have a vision of God, “whether they are believers of in the Quran, the Vedas, the Book of David, or the old and new testaments” (Dara Shikuh 1998: 50). His proof is that “one who disbelieves the beholding of God is a thoughtless and sightless member of his community, the reason being: if the Holy Self is omnipotent, how can He not have the potency to manifest Himself!” (Ibid.). Then, he moves on to a comparison between various schools of thought among Muslims on this topic, but this is beyond the concern of my argument here. What is relevant is that for him, a genuine believer whose “internal and external eyes” has become one, finds examples in the persona of the Prophets. If they have done so, then anyone can achieve a “perfect royat (beholding)” (Ibid.: 52–53). In the later sections of the book, Dara Shikuh continues with various forms of human understanding about the Omnipotent Holy Self, such as the notion of Brahman among the Hindus, which Dara Shikuh describes as referring to the totality of being or “All” (Kul ), whose “proportion to all is equal and every creation and exhibition takes place in its midst—hence the name Brahman, given to it by the Indian monotheists” (Ibid.: 64). He concludes therefore that Brahman in Hinduism and God in Islam mean the same thing. The rest of book contains similar efforts to demonstrate congruity between the official religion of the civitas, that is Islam with the other religions in India of the time. In short, Dara Shikuh wants to show that the “universal conciliation” is not simply a utilitarian policy but rather has deep roots in philosophical and mystical understandings of the worldview of the divine-transcendence. The third dimension of Akbar’s understanding of ethos for the Mughals’ civitas relates to the notion “the welfare of mankind” (Abulfazl 1873: vii). The significance of public welfare for one’s own community and then humankind also has an infused root in the Mughals’ civitas. The official religion of the king was the first obvious influence on concepts of welfare, and so I will explain how justice and welfare lie at the heart of Islam’s message. While submission to the commands of the absolute God demands righteous behavior for the individual, at a community level,

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it demands justice and fairness. Beyond this, it requires accountability to subjects, and in this sense the Mughals emulated ancient Indian kings, who abided by the institution of Jharokha Darshan, which was practiced by the Maurya dynasty more than two millennia ago. The early Mughal kings displayed both Jharokha Darshan and Islam, but Akbar formulated them into a clear policy that became an established practice of the future rulers. I will say a few words about each. As to the first source, Islam, I remind the reader again of what I said at the beginning of this chapter: Islam calls upon its followers to submit (to the right thing) and to strive (to do the right thing, rightly). In this context, while one engages playing human (the greater jihad), they are dedicated to din-i-ilahi, that spiritual domain where everything is orderly and moral, but while playing human in relation to others (the lesser jihad), it means striving for social justice. The British scholar of comparative religion Karen Armstrong (b. 1944) has published a short but important book entitled Islam: A Short History (2000), covering the whole history of Islam. On the surface, the book focuses on history, but there is a nuanced message in the title: why is the main title “Islam,” suggesting the book is about the message of this religion, the subtitle “a short history,” when the content is a broad brush stroke of the Muslim venture, from the time of the formation of Islam to the twentieth century? A careful reading of the content makes it clear that Armstrong is depicting the long historical struggles of the Muslims as a quest for justice. I think Armstrong has captured the essence of the message of Islam well, and thus one could surmise that the focus of any public policy for a Muslim civitas should be justice and its implementation, not just for the Muslim community itself, but for “the welfare of the mankind.” In her words: In Islam, Muslims looked for God in history. Their sacred scripture, the Quran, gave them a historical mission. Their chief duty was to create a just community in which all members, even the most weak and vulnerable, were treated with absolute respect. The experience of building such society and living in it would give them intimations of the divine, because they would be living in accordance with God’s will. (2000: xi)

Without engaging in an academic debate about the meaning of “just community” or justice (see, e.g., Khadduri 1984), I contend that the various traditions of Muslim political thought concur that “fairness and

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equity” comes very close to the social message of Islam in all aspects of public life. How did that play out in the Mughals’ civitas? In his work Ain-iAkbari (Akbar’s codes of conduct or rules), Abulfazl offers revealing answers. For, my purpose here, rules one and two of “the first book” (containing 90 detailed sub-rules) are of special interest and significance. First, it reviews how to be a Muslim by putting your personal conduct in order first, and then how to have orderly relations with others: both, however, are grounded in fairness. Ain (rule) number one entitled “the household” (1873: 11–12) explains the way Akbar’s “household” (court) performed and how he managed his private and personal life. Ain (rule) number two, entitled “the imperial treasure” (Ibid.: 12–15), focuses on Akbar’s public conduct. In subsequent rules, Abulfazl goes into detail of very specific aspects of Mughal public affairs, including rules for caring for the horses at the service of the army. Here is how Abulfazl begins his account: Every man of sense and understanding knows that the best of worshiping God consists in allaying the distress of the times and in improving the condition of man. This depends, however, on the advancement of agriculture, on the order kept in the king’s household, on the readiness of the champions of the empire, and discipline of the army. All this again relates to the exercise of proper care on the part of the monarch, his love for the people, and with the intelligent management of the revenues and the public expenditure. It is only when cared for, that the inhabitants of the towns, and those of the rural districts, can satisfy this wants, and to enjoy prosperity. Hence, it is incumbent on the just kings, to care for the former, and to protect the latter class of men. (ibid.: 12, italic added)

This is a clear statement about Akbar’s commitment to social justice, just as he was genuine about his own righteousness when he declared the din-i-elahi. There is an aphorism among Iranian Muslims that “a polity endures unbelief but cannot survive injustice.” Some even attribute this saying to the prophet, but it is not found in his legacy. Nevertheless, it conveys an eternal truth about public affairs. It seems to me that Akbar must have been familiar with this because it is well known and an oft-repeated notion in the genre of treatises known in Iranian political thought as “the mirror of princes,” which was also known in India. Whether for this reason or not, Akbar instituted the ancient known Indian practice of Jharokha Darshan or regular public appearance of

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the king so that people could easily and directly air their grievances. The Sanskrit phrase Jharokha Darshan literally means “sight from the balcony or bay window.” The literature on the Mughal architecture describes Jharokha as an oriel window projecting from upper storeys of a building projecting from the wall face of the building overlooking a street, the marketplace, or an open space (Zulfikar 2018: 70). In combination with Darshan, meaning “sight” or “beholding,” it meant “a direct way of interacting with the audience or subject” (Ibid.: 72). It is reported that Akbar practiced Jharokha Darshan religiously, attending daily to the concern of his subjects, going beyond administrative and legal appeals processes. Not only Akbar practiced this, but so did other kings after him. That said, any time legalistic and juridical reading of the ethos of civitas gained dominance, such as during the reign of the fourth king, Jahangir (1569–1627), Jharoka Darshan was undermined and cast as “un-Islamic.” The fact remained, however, that concern for social justice and a sense of accountability toward the people and the welfare of mankind constituted a pillar of the Mughals’ ethos and social imaginary. At the same time, the Mughals created institutions, structures, and organizations that supported these pillars, facilitating presence in the theater of their civitas, the topic I turn to next. Before moving on, however, I should mention that this sophisticated social imaginary relied on scholarly resources and research materials, held in libraries holding more than 20,000 volumes in a variety of subjects and in various languages, established as part of Akbar’s patronage of art and culture. It is said that he even instituted an exclusive library for women.

Theater: The Monarchy, Social Classes, and the Guided Mode of Production As I did in my discussion of the Achaemenids, I will offer an account of the three aspects of the political in the Mughals’ civitas, i.e., politics, society, and economy. Before I address the features of theater in the Mughals’ civitas, I would like to remind the reader about an observation I offered at the beginning of this book, namely that generally the direction of migration of capital and people is always toward a theater that encourages presence in the political. Insofar as the Mughals are concerned, a mass of scholars and literary figures (that is to say, elites) migrated to

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Mughal India between the fourteenth and eighteenth centuries, particularly from Iran (Haneda 1997). They must have seen the theater of Mughals’ civitas as a “land of opportunity and hope.” The figures are staggering: “the relative proportion of the Iranian elite was 25.54 percent in 1575-959, 28.4 percent in 1647-48, 27.8 percent in 1658-78 and 21.9 percent in 1679-1707” (Ibid.: 131). The influence of these newcomers extended beyond the political but also to the literary: they crafted a new style of Persian literature and poetry called Sabk-e Hindi, which translates to “the Indian style” (see e.g. Sharma 2017 and Smith 2016). What were the features of this attractive and luring theater? The first relates to the political regime. Two sources contributed to the shaping of the political theater in Mughals’ civitas. One was the political tradition of the Timurid era (1370–1507) created by Tamerlane, a dynasty to which the Mughals claimed direct lineage. The other was the Persian tradition of kingship (or “Persianate,” as Hodgson terms it), which formed the cultural and civilizational milieu of the Muslim world until the advent of modernity. In both cases, the institution of Kingship (monarchy) was at the helm of politics and administration, not the Caliphate (Caliphdom), the institution that had been the central institution of Muslim polities for centuries. According to the main formulator of the theory of Caliphate, Abu al-Hassan al-Mawardi (972–1058), the Shari’a (the law of Islam) necessitates a leader and a juridical narrative of Islam legitimates the form, content, and mechanisms that such office might require (Mawardi 2000: 10–11). According to this dominant paradigm, leadership cannot reside in anything but the Caliphate (which in reality was the result of a mixture of juridical narrative of the teaching of Islam combined with tribal traditions of the Arabian peninsula, and took shape right after the death of the prophet in 632). Even some contemporary thinkers defend the Caliphate (see, e.g., Enayat 1982: 52–110) and some Muslim movements try to revive it. The awful and inhumane group ISIS (a radical conservative group also known as the Islamic State) claims to have revived the Caliphate. Kingdoms, on the other hand, claim broader appeal, and sources of legitimacy vary from the philosophical and mystical readings of Islam to common sense arguments. While Caliph means “deputy,” here specifically “the deputy of the Prophet,” kingship ideally reflects the divine. Hence, its legitimation required a broader understanding of the worldview of the divine-transcendence, which, as we saw, the Mughals offered in the form of din-i-ilahi (the divine religion). Also, the fact that the Mongolian invasion of the Muslim world destroyed

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the institution of the Caliph and the fact that an orthodox thinker like Ibn Taymiyyah (1263–1328) declared the institution of the Caliphate unnecessary as long as the polity based its legitimacy on the Shari‘a (Black 2011: 159), might have made it easier for the Sunni Mughals of India to dispense with the Caliphate. What the Mughal kings, especially Akbar, created from these sources as the new intellectual framework, institutional arrangements, and practical policies, went on to serve as a model in the new theater for all recognized players—rulers at all levels, citizens of all social classes, and the economic system. Collectively, they fostered and maintained space for presence in the political. Abulfazl captures the main features in his two-volume work Ain i Akbari, particularly in the preface. He demonstrates how Akbar gave meaning to the institution of kingship not only for himself but as a paradigm for other Mughal officials. In Abulfazl’s words, “Royalty is a light emanating from God, and a ray from the sun, the illuminator of the universe, the argument of the book of perfection, the receptacle of virtues. Modern language calls this farr-i-izadi [the divine light], and the tongue of antiquity called it kiyan khavrah [the sublime halo]” (1873 Volume 1: iii). Not everyone can possess the light, however. According to Abulfazl, only those with proper dispositions and proper behavior might do so. He counts four qualities for such a disposition: “1) A paternal love toward the subjects. Thousands find rest in the love of the king; and sectarian differences do not rise the dust of strive; … 2) A large heart. The sight of anything disagreeable does not unsettle him; … 3) A daily increasing trust in God. When he performs an action, he considers God as the real doer of it (and himself as the medium), so that the conflict of motives can produce no disturbance;… [and] 4) [commitment to] prayer and devotion. The success of his plans will not lead him to neglect; nor will adversely cause him to forget God, and madly trust in man” (Ibid., italic in the original). Contemporary readers may be disappointed with the sense of a “patronizing” figure or may disagree with the religious undertones here, but he describes a person who has the disposition of a caring, generous, selfconfident, and upright father figure within a worldview dominated by an omnipotent and omnipresent divine-transcendence. A review of the actual behavior of Akbar shows that he tried to embody this disposition. Contemporary descriptions note his exemplarity: he always “sits on the eminence of propriety” and when he sits in judgment, he, “on account of his mildness, [is] the suiter of justice.” Above all, he seeks the council of people of fortitude: “He is forever searching

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after those who speak the truth and is not displeased with words that seem bitter but are in reality sweet” (Ibid.: iv). The combination of these qualities makes him better than anyone else; this is why the king is given the suffix shah (the best). As Abulfazl writes, “Shah is also a name given to one who surpasses his fellows, as you see from words like shah-savar [best chevalier], shah-rah [the best road]” (Ibid.: ii). Despite the constellation of the mental disposition, appropriate behavior, and constant striving to be an exemplar, the King of king’s main task was to conduct the orchestra, acting as a protector and an arbiter, not an executioner and a judge. Abulfazl’s comparison is insightful: And in the same manner that the equilibrium of the animal constitution depends upon an equal mixture of the elements, so also does the political constitution become well-tempered by a proper division of ranks; by the means of the warmth of unanimity and concord, a multitude of people become fused into one loyalty. (ibid.: iv)

These descriptions best capture Akbar’s mind-set and modus operandi. Akbar himself claimed that he looked up to his ancestral model, the Tamerlane, and his grandfather Babur. For example, in his conducting the affairs of the polity, we saw how Babur based decisions on expert advice, including major long-term strategies. For example, note the following passage from Babur’s memoir about the decision-making process that led to the creation of the Mughals’ civitas: From the date 910 [1504] at which the country of Kabul was conquered, to now [932/1526, my] desire for Hindustan had been constant, but owing sometimes to the feeble counsels of begs [chieftains, governors] sometimes to the non-accompaniment of elder and younger brethren [Courtesans including relatives of the king] a move on Hindustan had not been practicable and its territories had remained unsubdued. (Babur 1922: 478)

As I noted before, Akbar behaved similarly. His decision decided to change the base of the polity from a Shari‘a-minded reading of Islam to a philosophical-mystical understanding of the holy text followed extensive consultation that even included leaders of the materialist group Charvaka. Not only during the time of Akbar but throughout the history of the Mughals, this administrative apparatus formed the basis of the operation of the state, with the four layers of “nobilities, helpers, companions

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and servants.” The first and the third layers appear even to have functioned as consultative bodies, on general policies and also on particular issues, within the parameters of the social imaginary based on Islam, since as Hodgson rightly observed, the “state continued to be unmistakably a Muslim state, and most high positions were held by Muslims.” He is quick to add, though, that although, “Akbar’s empire was Muslim in its foundation and in the ultimate locus of power, yet Hindus and Muslims co-operated effectively at its actual management, and jointly reaped its benefit in wealth and splendour” (1974: volume 3, 66–67). This interesting paradox of official commitment to Islam and political and administrative inclusivity applied to the society of the Mughals’ civitas as well and to other social groupings, including the newly arriving groups of western Christians. Part of the credit goes to social grouping that developed in the Mughals’ civitas. If we consider the picture Abulfazl draws for us, my meaning becomes clear: The people of the world may be divided into four classes. 1) “Warriors,” who in the political body have the nature of fire. Their flames, directed by understanding, consume the straw and rubbish of rebellion and strife, but kindle also the lamp of rest in this world of disturbances; 2) “Artificers and merchants,” who hold the place of air. From their labor and travels, God’s gifts become universal, and the breeze of contentment nourishes the rose-tree life; 3) “The learned,” such as the philosopher, the physician, the arithmetician, the geometrician, the astronomer, who resemble water. From their pen and their wisdom, a river rises in the drought of the world, and the garden of the creation receives from their irrigating powers a peculiar freshness; [and] 4) “Husbandmen and laborers,” who may be compared to earth. By their exertions, the staple of life is brought to perfection, and strength and happiness flow from their work. (1873: iv–v)

This social classification resembles Taylor’s claim about hierarchical complementarity of all social classes in medieval time, or in his words “the society of three orders- orators, bellatores, laboratores ” (2004: 11, italic in the original). Yet, there are some striking differences between Taylor’s account and the stratification of Indian society, as captured in the passage above. The first and the biggest pertains to the absence of a religious class. That is striking in a Muslim polity claiming to base its being on the revealed message of Islam, and in a society where for centuries, the

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most powerful social position belonged to the Brahmans, or the religious class and the orators. One could argue, however, that the Mughals simply expanded the religious class because its place has been taken by “the learned” class. But in the Mughals’ civitas, the activities of the learned class relate mostly to secular life, congruent with the philosophical/mystical reading of Islam in the Mughals’ civitas. The second is the emphasis on “Artificers and merchants,” which indicates the change in the economy from purely tributary agrarianism to a combination of agriculture, light industries, and trade, as I will discuss shortly. The other difference from Taylor’s society of three orders relates to the absence of bureaucracy, which we saw was part of the social stratification for the Persian Achaemenids. This is significant in the sense that administrative privileges did not lead to the formation of an inflexible social status, but as we saw when discussing Akbar’s administrative reforms, developed as a matter of a functional division of labor with some sense of meritocracy. These four strata, or in Abulfazl’s words, “four ranks of men,” collectively made it possible for “the grand political body to maintain its equilibrium” (Abulfazl 1873: v). He even goes further and maintains that “the welfare of the whole world depends upon the successful working of the above mentioned four classes” (ibid..: viii) In terms of material production, the Mughals’ theater was chiefly agrarian, but manufacture and trade also played important roles. In the agrarian sphere, the social imaginary and hierarchical system of complementarity managed and conducted cultivation and harvest. Even though analyzing the system with a prejudiced Marxian outlook, the Indian historian Irfan Habib (b. 1931) offers a useful portrayal of the workings of a typical agrarian community under the Mughals: The community, by sustaining village sufficiency, enlarged the surplus, and made its realisation easier; the [village] oligarchs as controllers of the community mechanism became petty sharers in the surplus; but it was the Mughal ruling class, to which the major share of the surplus went in the form of tax, that was the ultimate beneficiary. All the three elements formed in normal times a cohesive exploitative whole. (Habib 1999: 159–60)

From this description, we see that the Mughal rural community consisted of three players, albeit in a hierarchy—farmers, village oligarchy, and mansabdars —who were collectively responsible for both the “sufficiency

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and surplus” of the economy. If one ignores the Marxist undertones, we can note that it was not “a cohesive exploitative whole” but rather worked as a dynamic tributary economy in a developing context, and we can see how it contributed to the maintenance of the political and enhancing presence within the bound of “infused” social imaginary of the Mughals. I know critics might say even if one gives the system the benefit of the doubt, it still was an arbitrary system based on the whim of the king and the oligarchy, but I have to remind them and the reader that until the advent of modernity, belief in the hereafter and the coming of a day of judgment served as a check on arbitrary behavior. Taylor’s accurate observation is that until the modern time “God was not an option” (2007). Going back to the passage, the farmers, the village oligarchy, and the mandabdars operated within a working system of God-CreationDay-of-Reckoning which made each player concerned with fairness and justice. As anecdotal evidence, I would like to point out that I grew up in a somewhat similar environment in Iran. Even as late as my childhood in an Iranian village in the 1950s, a similar hierarchical complementarity was at work. Under the umbrella of a divine cosmos and a robust belief in the day of reckoning, fear of retribution from God or the gods brought some degree of respect for mutual interest and dignity, very much like the fear of the Internal Revenue System (IRS) and the legal system do today. In fact, as noted, the administrative institutions of mansabdars directly affected and helped the management of agrarian production, where each region produced specific commodities and was taxed based on an objective evaluation of the level of production in the previous years. For example, “Gujrat imported much of its food and exported cash crops—cotton, dyes, and the like” (Hodgson 1974, Volume 3: 90). As to other areas of economic production, “India was also noted for its manufactures—precious fabrics, steel ware, all kind of luxury goods” (ibid.). As to commerce, various regions had a strong commercial network, as Gujrat “was noted for the rich commerce of its cities” (ibid.). One area that was not very strong, however, was international trade, which was beginning to become more important overall, particularly at the end of Mughal era, and that indeed may have been the main cause of its downfall. When Portuguese explorers and traders came to the region, they were not seen with suspicion so by the time the Mughals saw the negative impact of foreign monopolies, it was too late to control them, so the pressure continued on the agrarian sector, a topic well beyond my scope here.

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One fact cannot be denied, however: the Mughals’ civitas must have done something right to make India the richest polity of its time. In Hodgson’s words, “In the minds of much of the world, including Muslims from Nile to Oxus, India was a land of wealth. … The rich rulers of India could live in unrivalled luxury” (ibid.). The polity enjoyed a robust and dynamic mixed economy of agriculture, manufactures and trade, all guided and supported by the state. ∗ ∗ ∗ By way of conclusion, I would like to share with the reader my feelings when I finished this chapter. In wondering about the Mughals’ civitas, I could relate to it. I imagined it as a civilization existing between tradition and modernity, between the old and the new, between an agrarian mode and the beginning of industrial manufacturing, and a civilization at the age of enormous transformation that continues to melt all that is solid into air, to borrow Marx’s observation of modernity (The Communist Manifesto: chapter one). Even though I am from Iran and have an ancestral affinity with ancient Persia, I did not have the same feeling of affinity with the Achaemenids, despite their fascinating world and their glamor. My interest there was at the intellectual level; I could understand and appreciate their greatness and their achievements. As I said I would been happy to live there but I could not see myself as part of it; the glory and glamor overwhelmed me. With the Mughals, on the other hand, there was greatness embedded in humility, thus I felt an interesting sense of affinity. Indeed, as I write this chapter in the second half of May 2020, I remember my research visit to India some years ago in late April and early May. Visiting the Taj Mahal, the prize of the Mughals, I recount complaining about the heat to my private tour guide. His answer was amazing, taking me into the world of Mughals. This is what he said: “Of course it is hot now here, not because we are getting to the hot season, but because you are standing in a historical monument, only reflecting its civilizational context. Why do you not close your eyes and travel mentally to a time when this place was alive with life! Imagine the beautiful, fine, colourful, drapes, with infused design and first-rate material produced for the king, offering shade all over the building, including the gardens and the pavilions while the breeze makes them dance in a rhapsody of colours. Imagine all the water fountains running and the currents of water making

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a beautiful music of water flow. And of course, imagine all the flowers that from the time of Babur had been imported to these gardens, all blooming with their aroma that would make the heavens jealous. I promise, you would not have felt uncomfortable, but quite happy and serene.” With those words, and my eyes closed, I truly was immersed so deeply in the world of the Mughals that only my concern for his time as a tour guide could disturb my daydream. I could see and feel the concomitant, comprehensive, and convivial production all around me that aroused a desire in me to join the developing and dynamic world of the Mughals. In that world of imagined reality, I had no difficulty seeing myself as a member of Akbar’s “Translation Bureau” (maktab khana), or as a novice in regular meetings of “the House of Devotion” (‘ebadat khana), or as a member of the staff in his magnificent library of books written in so many different languages. I could imagine myself as a member of the Charvaka school arguing with a religionist interlocutor, while Abulfazl or Akbar moderated our debate. Even though I am too selfish to see myself as a devoted servant of the “welfare of the mankind,” I could see myself as mansabdar in the bureaucracy of the Mughals. I could imagine myself as an audience in one of the regular Jharokha Darshan, either bringing a concern to the attention of the King of kings or listening to a humble farmer appealing to the king. I could also imagine being that farmer and having confidence that my concerns would be heard. In such a theater of the political, it was not at all difficult to make your presence known and play one’s humanity to the fullest.

Sources Cited Abulfazl, ‘Allami. 1873. Ain i Akbari. Vol. 1, Translated from Persian by H. Blochmann. Calcutta: The Asiatic Society. ———. 1891. Ain i Akbari. Vol. 2, Translated from Persian by Colonel H. S. Jarrett. Bengal: The Asiatic Society. ———. 1975. Akbar Namah. Lahore: Sheikh Mubak Ali, Publishers and Booksellers. (Abridged), First Pakistani Reprint. Al-Mawardi, Abu al-Hassan. 2000. Al-Ahkam as-Sultaniyya; the Laws of Islamic Governance. Translated from Arabic, Asadullah Yate. London: Ta-Ha Publishers Ltd. Armstrong, Karen. 2000. Islam: A Short History. New York: Random house. Babur, Zahir’d-din Muhammad. 1922. The Babur Nama in English (Memoirs of Babur). Translated by Annette Susannah Beveridge. London: Luzac and Co.

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Black, Antony. 2011. The History of Islamic Political Thought; From the Prophet to the Present. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, Second Edition. Chandra, Satish. 2007. History of Medieval India. New Delhi: Orient Longman. Dale, Stephen F. 2018. Babur: Timurid Prince and Mughal Emperor, 1483–1530. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2004. The Garden of the Eight Paradises: B¯ abur and the Culture of Empire in Central Asia, Afghanistan, and India (1483–1530). Leiden: Brill. Dara Shikuh, Prince Muhammad. 1998. Majma‘-ul-Bahrain or the Mingling of the Two Oceans. Edited in the Original Persian with English Translation, Notes and Variants by M. Mahfuz-ul-Haq. Calcutta: The Asiatic Society, second reprint. Donde, Dipanwita. 2016. “The Portrait Image of Emperor Akbar in the Akbar Nama and Beyond” (September 5), retrieved from the website, “Voices from the Sylff Community” on May 22, 2020. Early, Abraham. 2003. The Mughal Throne; the Saga of India’s Great Emperors. London: Phonix. Enayat, Hamid. 1982. Modern Islamic Political Thought. Austin: The University of Texas Press. Habib, Irfan. 1999. The Agrarian System of Mughal India (1556–1707). New Delhi: Oxford University Press, second (revised) edition. Haneda, Masashi. 1997. “Emigration of Iranian Elites to India during the 16th– 18th Centuries.” Cahiers d’Asie Centrale 3 (4) (October): 129–143. Hodgson, Marshal. 1374. The Venture of Islam. 3 vols. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Khadduri, Majid. 1984. The Islamic Conception of Justice. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Masud, Muhammad Khalid. 2016. Religion and State in Late Mughal India: The Official Status of the Fatwa Alamgiri. Lums Law Journal 3 (2): 32–50. Roychoudhuri, Makhanlal. 1941. The Din-i-Ilahi or the Religion of Akbar. Calcutta: University of Calcutta Press. Zulfikar, Zain. 2018. “Tracing the Origin of Jharokha window used in Indian Subcontinent.” Journal of Islamic Architecture 5 (2) (December): 70–76.

CHAPTER 7

The Americans: a Civitas of Human-Immanence

Human beings value freedom to live their lives as they see fit, not even as God commands. They rebelled against God with the price of depriving themselves of the heavens to do that. They also like appreciation of their freedom by others, hence, cherish welcoming and open arms, an amazing twine of freedom and openness. The American experience seems to be the most successful in combining “freedom and openness,” no doubt with many moments of disastrous failure. Anonymous

The third and final example of civitas for this book examines a civilized context within the other major worldview that humanity has imagined, namely “human-immanence.” The enormous transformation in the material and non-material spheres of human lifeworld since the Renaissance (c. 1300) has caused and strengthened the development of this worldview. Almost everyone refers to this process as the coming of modernity, secularity, secularization, and the secular ethos. Even Charles Taylor, with whom I have enormous affinity and who says he has struggled with the notion of “secular” (2007: 14), in the end uses the notion of secularity, calling his influential work A Secular Age. The contents of this book make clear that what distinguishes our self and social self-understanding presently relates to the issue of the presence of the divine, in that modern society is defined by its “move away from a society where belief in God is

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unchallenged” (Ibid.: 3), or even more aptly, “in contrast with the divine foundation of society” (Ibid.: 192). For me, that very distinction suggests that I should not use the notion of secularity. This concept is a derivative of Latin saecularis, which means “of an age, occurring once in an age.” As we have encountered the notion here in this book, the worldview of human-immanence has appeared before, in India, China, and most famously in ancient Greece as Sophism. In other words, it is not limited to one time period, but now it has gained currency, so much so that it has become the dominant paradigm across the world. On the other hand, in a striking way, this worldview resembles that of divine-immanence, with the important difference that human beings have replaced the gods. Just as in the divine-immanence world, where everything had to be justified and explained in terms of the gods and their will, the human-immanence worldview requires justification and will of human beings. In theory, ordinary human beings, free from the burden of race (superiority or inferiority of blood), gender (superiority or inferiority of sex), ethnicity (superiority or inferiority of tribe), and culture (superiority or inferiority of history, language, or artistic imagination), figuratively replace the gods. The depiction by Peter Berger et al. is very apt and revelatory: “The concept of naked self, beyond institutions and roles, as the ens realissimum [the most real of all things] being of human being, is at the very heart of modernity” (1973: 213). The idea of the naked self began to take hold in the Renaissance, but when it found political expression and the centrality of human agency were recognized, it came into its own. Its political expression came in the principle of: “Cuius regio, eius religio” (whose realm, his religion, or the religion of the prince becomes the religion of the polity). This was debated and accepted at the peace of Augsburg in 1555, which ended major armed conflicts between Catholics and Protestants. Henceforth, the will of the polity would determine the fate of religion, that is “the official religion,” not state religion. Once again, having a state religion is a dangerous and destructive enterprise, while not having an official or civic religion deprives society of robust moral boundaries to support personal self and social self-definitions. For this reason, one should not assume that modernity is against religion, as some have. Taylor’s insightful observation is accurate both theoretically and historically: “Modernity is secular, not in the frequent, rather loose sense of the word, where it designates the absence of religion, but rather in the fact that religion occupies a different

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place, compatible with the sense that social action takes place in profane time” (2004: 194). The full meaning and global implications of this apparently local occurrence only became clear during the gathering for the Peace of Westphalia in the two German cities of Osnabrück and Münster in 1648 (15 May–24 October). There is now a consensus among scholars of modern political thought and international relations that this date marks the birth of the modern nation-state, with the collective will of the people as its sovereign. From the point of view of presence in the political, I should attend to the notion of the nation-state, the great signifier for the civitas of modernity and the worldview of human-immanence. The modern theater belongs exclusively to the nation (the voice of the people) and symbolizes the sovereign. The nation decides the borders of the territory that the members of the nation call their homeland and decides the form of state organization the members choose for their governance. The constitutive elements of this new unit are, in order of significance, sovereignty, the people (nation), boundaries (territory), and government (constitution). This unit has been given the German name “staat” (stand firm) or “state” in English, and as a new paradigm, unlike its previous counterparts, it has captured the world over. The nation-state has become a global phenomenon, and today (2020), there are 195 such units, symbolized by the United Nations, while some, such as the Palestinians, are still fighting for or awaiting their “sovereignty.” It took centuries for the state to make its way from Westphalia to the United Nations. Historical landmarks in the process include the 1688 “Glorious Revolution” in Britain, which strengthened the supremacy of parliament over the authority of the king; the American Revolution of 1776 (July 4) with its Declaration of Independence and the inauguration of its constitution in 1789 (April 30), which institutionalized the notion of “we the people,” and their “inalienable” rights, that is not granted by any divine commandment; and the French Revolution of 1789 (July 14), which ended the legitimacy of the sacred power of the king by bringing the modern constitution as the manifestation of the consent of the people, or the social contract, as the foundation of the modern polity. These are momentous events, but there are still battles to be fought for the civitas of modernity, such as equal rights, women’s franchise, intellectual rights, and multiculturalism. The saga continues. As to the main and substantial promise of the modern civitas, the ideas of “the naked self, social contract, and national state” have made the

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presence in the political of the civitas within the worldview of humanimmanence a possibility. The key to that possibility is in two notions of freedom and openness. I discussed freedom in the first section as a combination of negative, affirmative, and assertive liberties that collectively allow human beings to imagine without limits, or in the words of American philosopher Allan Bloom (1930–1992), the freedom “of legislating to himself and to nature… without guidance from nature” (Bloom 1987: 180). Openness means the acceptance of the creativity, spontaneity, and ingenuity that comes with that legislation. Or it is the willingness of the national state as the theater of the people to be open to any person or any idea that wishes to make a presence and further guarantees the possibility for the innate freedom and potential of the naked selves to manifest themselves, at least in theory. The ideals of modernity accommodate both in theory, and its civitas opens the space for their manifestation. Now, there is a choice to be made about which contemporary civitas might serve as a good example. It is safe to argue that modernity is taken as synonymous with the rise of the West, yet the West is not monolithic. Certainly, today in the age of globalization and multiculturalism, the contemporary West serves as a generous host for diverse views, cultures, ethnicities, and peoples. It is not surprising that it is common to speak of modernity in the plural, using the concept of modernities. This obvious fact makes it hard to determine which parts of the West or the world truly represent the culture and civilization of modernity. If we stay within the regions where modernity first appeared, should the choice therefore be in Europe? For instance, should one have a historical lens and concentrate on Italy where the whole process of modernity began with the Renaissance in the fourteenth century and produced geniuses like Da Vinci and Machiavelli, considered the father of modern political science? Should one choose England, which peacefully transformed itself from the worldview of divine-transcendence to that of modernity and produced Thomas Hobbs and John Locke, considered the fathers of the “social contract” theory of government? Should one focus on France, which had a truly “modern” revolution, opening the gates of citizenship to ordinary people and producing Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who focused on the general will and the will of the people? Should one focus on Germany, where the real battles between the followers of divinetranscendence and human-immanence in the form of religious reforms took place, producing thinkers like Martin Luther, the father of religious reform, and Georg Hegel, the father of modern political thought? Or

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should one look beyond Europe to places where modernity has developed further? What about concentrating on New Zealand and Australia, who are immigrant-friendly? What about the Americas? There are even more candidates as well, but here I have chosen to concentrate on the United States for the following reasons. First and foremost, I feel the Founding Fathers of America instituted their polity with the goal of a civitas based on the ideals of the worldview of human-immanence more than any other polity that has taken shape in modernity. I would even dare say, despite recent setbacks beginning with Ronald Reagan and now culminating in Donald Trump, that the United States is the only polity that has managed to combine freedom and openness, and to remain free and open. Secondly, for now, the United States is the core state of the civitas of modernity, even though it has not always lived up to the responsibilities of its position (see, e.g., Bacevich 2008; Niebuhr 1952; Williams 1959). It is still the only state where the social contract, namely the rule of law, can check the arbitrary tendencies of an unruly official, including the highest officer of the land, that is, the president. Thirdly, despite the moral crisis of 2008 and the cultural deadlock of recent years (2010s), the United States is still the most productive unit comprehensively, concomitantly, and convivially. In other words, each of these regions in the examples I gave above contributed in its own way, but each only in one specific area: Italy, the Renaissance of thought and art; Britain, the Industrial Revolution, the social contract, capitalism, and mercantilism; France, political revolution and national sovereignty; and Germany, German Idealism and its critiques. These amazing developments coalesced together, however, on the North American continent, especially in the United States, and to some extent in Canada. There, they blossomed into a concomitant, comprehensive, and convivial production of the civitas of modernity. Locke, one of the main architects of the social contract theory, has an insightful comment that may offer the best justification for concentrating on America in his Two Treatises of Government: “in the beginning, all the world was America” (II: chapter 5, “of property”). America offered a tabula rasa for humanity to test a new order.

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Presence: Officer of the Good; Washington and Lincoln In terms of presence, like all other civitates before it, the American civitas expects adherence to the dictates of its social imaginary. I will elaborate upon what those dictates are in the next section under “ethos,” but suffice it to say here that they amount to whatever “elevated and alone” (Bloom 1987: 180) human beings have desired and considered good, which has been expressed in the motto of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” In a sense, then, the role and the duty of each member are to own and uphold, modify, or change these values. Everyone should act as an officer of the good, defined as ethos. As in the two previous chapters, I will focus on two heroes, one as the initiator of the polity/civitas or the conqueror with a vision and the other as a statesperson who strengthened and enhanced the civitas by his vision. For the first category, there is a host of characters to choose from, collectively known as the Founding Fathers. Many of these leaders display the character of a conqueror with a vision, including George Washington, Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790), Thomas Jefferson, and Alexander Hamilton (1755 or 1757–1804). I could concentrate on any one of them, even though some straddle the line between conqueror and statesman, but the one who truly stands as the crème de la crème is Washington, who considered himself American before this polity had even become a reality. As the American journalist and historian Brookhiser puts it, “When American used the term ‘father of the country’ in the singular, it always, and only, meant Washington” (2014: 26). For a statesperson with a vision, whether actively as an officeholder or as a public intellectual, I also have choices from the following list that I think stand out: John Fitzgerald Kennedy (1917–1963), Martin Luther King Jr. (1929–1968), Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865), Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1882–1945), and Anna Eleanor Roosevelt (1884–1962). King and Lincoln emerged as my two top choices, and I had to think carefully to choose between them, but in the end, hesitatingly I settled on Lincoln. The first reason for this is the link between him and Washington: He was fascinated with the Founding Fathers, particularly Washington. In some ways, he looked up to Washington as a model of citizenship and devotion to the polity. It is not surprising that a recent biography of Lincoln is titled Founders’ Son. As a boy, Lincoln had read Parson L. Weems’s popular biography of Washington and was intrigued by it (Brookhiser 2014: 27).

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The life story of Washington shaped his understanding of America itself. Here is Lincoln’s own impression of the book, which he offered in an address to the New Jersey State Senate on February 21, 1861: I remember all the accounts there given of the battle fields and struggles for the liberties of the country… I recollect thinking then, boy even though I was, that there must have been something more than common that those men struggled for; that something even more than National Independence; that something that held out a great promise to all the people of the world to all time to come; I am exceedingly anxious that this Union, the Constitution, and the liberties of the people shall be perpetuated in accordance with the original idea for which that struggle was made, and I shall be most happy indeed if I shall be an humble instrument in the hands of the Almighty, and of this, his almost chosen people, for perpetuating the object of that great struggle.

The second reason relates to Lincoln’s difficult childhood: He grew up in poverty, without access to education, and with no sense of family until his stepmother joined the family. His ascent to political power strikes me as a manifestation of the idea of naked person in promise of modernity and in American theater of it as a land of equal opportunity promulgated by Washington. In this sense, Lincoln took up and implemented Washington’s ideal. Of course, Dr. King would later address the limitations in practice to those ideals of equality, in Washington’s time and his own and unfortunately persisting into our time period too. But the final and deciding reason relates to the career of Lincoln who made a great presence in the political while grappling with the dilemma of the perennial tension between order (security and preservation of the polity) and justice (equality and fairness). Dr. King could afford to concentrate mainly on justice. Tragically though, both men lost their lives for their ideals in the end. To capture the career of George Washington the conqueror, I will concentrate on three topics: (1) his role as wealthy landowner (2) his acquiring of socio-political status, and (3) his role as a revolutionary who fathered a nation. His acquisition of land came easily: He was born the first of six children to rich landowning Virginians who had immigrated from England. Although he did not have much formal education, he did learn mathematics, trigonometry, and land surveying, receiving a certificate from the College of William and Mary. For some time, he worked as a surveyor in the Shenandoah Valley. In addition to inheriting land

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from his father, he also bought land in the Valley. As a recent biographer puts it: “He never stopped accumulating acreage and by age twenty had assembled 2,315 acres in the Shenandoah Valley. For a young man who could not afford corn for his horse a year earlier, it was a startling and nearly dreamlike elevation in status” (Chernow 2010: 23). When his halfbrother Lawrence died in 1752, Washington leased his property, Mount Vernon, from his widow, which he inherited from her when she died in 1761. “Lawrence’s death provided another bonanza for George, on whom windfalls showered at the most implausible moments” (Ibid.: 26). This appetite for land grabbing displays the conquering mentality that led the Native American leader Tanacharison (c. 1700–1754), known by Europeans as the Half-King, to call him “the village devourer.” In 1752, Washington joined the Virginia militia, hoping to gain a British military commission. He was part of the militia for seven years, participating in early stages of the French and Indian War of 1754–1763. In January 1759, then 26 and retired from the militia, Washington married Martha Dandridge Custis, a widow who had inherited a large plantation. She had two children, whom Washington adopted and raised; he did not have children of his own. Washington’s land acquisition facilitated his acquisition of social status. While he was respected as a military hero, his role as a large landowner was seen as more significant socially. Indeed, the two roles were related: He acquired more land under the rubric of land bounties for the volunteer militias of the French and Indian War (Ibid.: 184). Apparently, after securing the land for the militias from the government, Washington turned around and bought it from them cheaply and that is why some of them felt they had been had (Ferling 2002: 137). At the same time, he began a political career by pursuing local office and was then elected to the Virginia provincial legislature in 1758 and seems to have put stock in his increasing socio-political status. By the late 1760s, when he had made the Mount Vernon estate his place of residence, he led a generous and by some reports lavish social life, entertaining people of status in the thousands. But while he enjoyed the lifestyle of British high society, he had a reputation for standing up to the British. For example, even though Washington imported many luxury goods from London, in 1769, he persuaded the Virginia Assembly to impose an embargo against British commodities (Ibid.:74). As for as being a conqueror through revolution, by the dawn of the American quest for independence in the mid-1770s, Washington had

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emerged as a major figure who stood in opposition to England. His shift from pro-British politics came with the 1765 Stamp Act. Up until this point, Washington had mostly striven to please his royal masters in London (Ibid.: 138). He was a delegate in the first Continental Congress (1774–1789), yet he kept active in the military by training militias in Virginia, so by the time the revolutionary war began in April 1775, he was among the top leadership candidates. In the end, he was chosen as the commander not only due to his military experience but because it was felt that he could keep his ambition in check far better his main rival for the post, John Hancock (1737–1793). He accepted the position without salary, asking only that his expenses be paid. From April 1775 until April 1783, when the war came to a victorious end, he displayed an enormous degree of bravery, perseverance, dedication, and hard work. War, however, is a temporary measure: Citizenship is much more important. It is said that Washington’s most magnanimous act was his resignation as the commander of chief and his return to civilian life, an important paradigm shift in the role of the civil-military relationship in the political sphere. Nowhere, this is stated more eloquently in Washington’s farewell address to the military on November 2, 1783. The way the address is constructed is interesting. He speaks in third person on behalf of the Commander (which was of course he himself) and the Congress. He first acknowledges the sacrifices the soldiers had made and the hardships that they endured, “presenting them with the thanks of their Country for their long, eminent and faithful Services.” He also reminds them that their hardships were in service of a great cause, the creation of a new home for the free. Then, he moves on to the important task of acknowledging that the war was not an end, but the means to create space for presence in the political, which for the modern person takes the form of citizenship. Thus, he recommends that the soldiers make this transition and welcome their new role as citizens: “The Commander in Chief conceives little is now wanting to enable the Soldier to change the Military character into that of the Citizen,” and they can do so with the same “steady and decent tenor of behavior, which has generally distinguished” them in the battlefield. He ends the address by saying that is what “the Commander” himself is going to do: “And being now to conclude these his last public Orders, to take his ultimate leave, in a short time, of the Military Character, and to bid a final adieu to the Armies he has so long had the honor to Command—he can only again offer in their behalf his recommendations to their grateful Country, and his prayers to the God of

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Armies.” His final words set the iron wall that has persisted in the United States as a functional division between the military and civilians: “With these Wishes, and this benediction, the Commander in Chief is about to retire from service- The Curtain of separation will soon be drawn- and the Military Scene to him will be closed forever.” To me, the last phrase establishes Washington as a “conqueror with a vision.” In particular, three items demonstrate that Washington is a person with vision: (1) his attention to his own “civilizing process”; (2) his attitude about the future political regime in the United States; and (3) his attitude toward slavery. As to the first, I have borrowed this phrase from the German sociologist Norbert Elias’s (1897–1990) book The Civilizing Process; Sociogenetic and Psychogenetic Investigation (2000, originally 1939). Elias’s central point is that major changes in the Western civitas, from a transformation in personal mind-sets, habits, and behavior to the formation of the modern state and international society, have resulted from gradual but relentless incremental etiquette changes in our daily conduct. Washington exemplifies this thesis. The etiquette handbook Washington’s Rules of Civility and Decent Behavior in Company and Conversation (1888) is attributed to him, and its editor says the following: “While the authorship of these rules or maxims of civility and decent behavior in company is not positively known, it may be inferred with reasonable certainty. They are found in the handwriting of George Washington when he was quite young” (1888: 5). It is also certain that “quite young” meant 13, so that Washington was conscious of a particular vision of civil life that he wanted to project, and of course he succeeded in displaying this vision, given that witnesses attest that he thoroughly mastered them himself. In total, the book contains 110 rules. Here is the first one: “Every action done in company, ought to be with some sign of respect, to those that are present” (Toner 1888: 11). This rule immediately reminded me of the words of Albert Schweitzer that I began this book with, suggesting that civilization is about conducting oneself with “reverence for life” (1987). Along the same lines, Washington states in rule 39 the following: “IN writing or Speaking, give to every Person his due Title According to his Degree and the Custom of the Place” (capitalization as in the original). Or note rule 89, which is short and sweet, but contains a large idea: “Speak not EVIL of the absent for it is unjust.” This is a categorical imperative, and not based on expediency or utilitarianism. But it seems

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Washington has saved the pinnacle of his vision for the last rule: “LABOR to keep alive in your Breast that Spark of Celestial fire called Conscience.” As to the second aspect of his vision, Washington had a clear image of the future polity and the form of its regime for the United States. By the time the Founding Fathers were planning the future regime, Washington had emerged as its obvious leader. There is a rumor that after the Battle of Yorktown (September 28–October 19, 1781), which turned the tide toward American victory, the creation of a monarchy with Washington as king was proposed, but he did not accept, and thus, America developed a federalist state. Washington was reluctant even to accept the role of president, clearly expressing doubt about his ability to perform the job both publicly and privately in his diary. Here is how he responded to Charles Thomson (1729–1824), the Secretary of the Continental Congress on April 14, 1789, when the latter came to announce Washington’s unanimous election to the job: I am so much affected by this fresh proof of my country’s esteem and confidence that silence can best explain my gratitude. While I realize the arduous nature of the task which is imposed upon me, and feel my own inability to perform it, I wish, however, that there may not be reason to regretting the choice, for, indeed, all I can promise is only to accomplish that which can be done by an honest zeal. (Cited in Mackie 2006: 93, n. 14)

Washington showed the same humility when he delivered his First Inaugural address on April 30, 1789. He began with the following phrase: “Among the vicissitudes incident to life, no event could have filled me with greater anxieties than that of which the notification was transmitted by your order, and received on the fourteenth day of the present month.” The third aspect of Washington as a conqueror with a vision relates to his attitude toward slavery. It is true that he owned slaves on his own plantation, but it seems that in principle, he wished he could do away with the practice. The following passage in one of his letters is important to note: “I never mean (unless some particular circumstances should compel me to it) to possess another slave by purchase; it being among my first wishes to see some plan adopted, by the legislature by which slavery in this Country may be abolished by slow, sure, and imperceptible degrees” (Letter to John Francis Mercer, September 9, 1786, Mount Vernon).

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Apparently, people knew about Washington’s opposition to slavery in principle, but it is also a fact that he justified continuing to own slaves out of claims of necessity. The ambiguity of this position seems demonstrated in part in a poem entitled “To His Excellency General Washington,” written by an enslaved African American, Phyllis Wheatley (1753–1784). Wheatley depicts him as a freedom-fighting hero, rather than as a slave owner who limited the freedom of others. Indeed, the poem’s subject is the “the cause of freedom” and Washington is its hero. Such a perception may reflect Wheatley’s knowledge of Washington’s personal sympathy for the fate of enslaved people. Washington’s response to her is filled with respect, including, inter alia, the following phrases: “But a variety of important occurrences, continually interposing to distract the mind and withdraw the attention, I hope will apologize for the delay, and plead my excuse for the seeming, but not real, neglect. I thank you most sincerely for your polite notice of me, in the elegant Lines you enclosed; and however undeserving I may be of such encomium and panegyric” (Letter to Phillis Wheatley, February 28, 1776, Cambridge). The most obvious sign of his sympathy for slaves is found in his will (George Washington’s Last Will and Testament, July 9, 1799). It is important to note that the first item deals with his debts, which are, in his words, “none of magnitude.” The second item leaves his estate to his wife. Next comes the fate of the slaves on his plantation. Here are his exact words: Item. Upon the decease of my wife, it is my Will and desire that all the Slaves which I hold in my own right, shall receive their freedom. To emancipate them during her life, would, tho’ earnestly wished by me, be attended with such insuperable difficulties on account of their intermixture by Marriages with the dower Negroes, as to excite the most painful sensations, if not disagreeable consequences from the latter, while both descriptions are in the occupancy of the same Proprietor; it not being in my power, under the tenure by which the dower Negroes are held, to manumit them. And whereas among those who will receive freedom according to this devise, there may be some, who from old age or bodily infirmities, and others who on account of their infancy, that will be unable to support themselves; it is my Will and desire that all who come under the first and second description shall be comfortably clothed and fed by my heirs while they live; and that such of the latter description as have no parents living, or if living are unable, or unwilling to provide for them, shall be bound by the Court until they shall arrive at the age of twenty

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five years; and in cases where no record can be produced, whereby their ages can be ascertained, the judgment of the Court, upon its own view of the subject, shall be adequate and final. The Negros thus bound, are (by their Masters or Mistresses) to be taught to read and write; and to be brought up to some useful occupation, agreeably to the Laws of the Commonwealth of Virginia, providing for the support of orphan and other poor children. and I do hereby expressly forbid the Sale, or transportation out of the said Commonwealth, of any Slave I may die possessed of, under any pretence whatsoever. And I do moreover most pointedly, and most solemnly enjoin it upon my Executors hereafter named, or the Survivors of them, to see that this clause respecting Slaves, and every part thereof be religiously fulfilled at the epoch at which it is directed to take place; without evasion, neglect or delay, after the crops which may then be on the ground are harvested, particularly as it respects the aged and infirm; seeing that a regular and permanent fund be established for their support so long as there are subjects requiring it; not trusting to the uncertain provision to be made by individuals.

This provision not only includes negative freedom of the removal of restraints, but also affirmative freedom in providing some means for maintaining that freedom. Whether they exercised assertive freedom, history does not tell us. What history does show, however, is that a limitation on Washington’s more progressive attitude on slavery was that his family did not share his views, at least not as enthusiastically or vigorously. As I have mentioned, the second figure in my discussion of the American civitas is Abraham Lincoln. Unlike Washington, he did not come from a well-established family, let alone an affluent one. In some ways, Lincoln was the perfect manifestation of the “naked self” that Berger calls the modern soul and even “the elevated and alone” person that Bloom has described. He lived up to the promise of modernity, i.e., that the ordinary and average person can realize his or her potential. Lincoln was a self-made man, beginning with his self-education: The total of his formal education amounted to less than one year. His mother introduced him to reading; his father told stories that Lincoln emulated enthusiastically; and his stepmother inculcated in him a love of reading that continued through his life. Indeed, he read everything he could find, from the Bible to the great works of literature and works related to his professions of law, politics, and for a while the military; he also read and re-read the classic of American political thought, The Federalist Papers . The Library of Congress has a record of the books he borrowed, including books

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on war and strategy. He also found in reading an emotional outlet that calmed his unsettled soul. The author of an eloquent short book entitled Lincoln, the Literary Genius begins aptly with the following words: “A great man of the past is hard to know, because his legend, which is at best a friendly caricature, hides him like a disguise” (Barzun 1960: 1). When a person is as great as Lincoln was, there is not a single legend about him but many competing ones. For me, the feature he shares with other giants of human history is that he was a statesman with a vision, the same vision I hope to have captured in Darius of ancient Iran and Akbar of medieval India, men who displayed enormous presence in the political and played human in their personal as well as public lives. As I have mentioned repeatedly, playing human relates to all aspects of the life of a human being, whether one acts in a personal capacity or is performing a social, cultural, political, or even artistic role. The author cited above, who concentrated on Lincoln’s vernacular, rightly speaks of an “artistic genius” accompanied by hard work and a crafty attitude toward the texts he used: “When we speak of the artist’s craft, we mean quite literally that he is crafty.” Lincoln’s craftiness by concentrating on “the only two ways known to man—reading and writing” (Ibid.: 26). He even wrote poetry, showing the soft part of his soul. Lincoln was a hard-working man, used to physical labor. Although he lacked the refinement of Washington, he married Mary Todd (1818– 1882), who was very refined herself and appreciated the distinctions that lay beneath his rough exterior. They were also bound together by their passion for public life, which led to Lincoln’s involvement in local politics and the issue of slavery, which not only consumed his life but led to his death. In speaking of Lincoln as a statesman with a vision, there are many angles one might take, but I feel it serves well to concentrate on the way he talks about himself and the way he handled the American Civil War— an event that almost destroyed the American polity—while managing to uphold and pursue the ideals of the American constitution. Lincoln believed that saving the Union that the founding father considered so significant as a polity and ending the slavery would have met their approval and caused their admiration. I contend that Lincoln introduced this broad objective in the Cooper Union Address on February 27, 1860, the speech that historians think secured his nomination for presidency by the Republican Party a few months later. The issue of slavery—and if I

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may generalize as the issue of how to deal with “the other”—dominates the speech, a dilemma that still haunts the United States of America, as well as all societies premised on the promises of modernity. I will deal with this shortly, but what is significant for me in the speech comes at the very end, when Lincoln seems to offer an intellectual paradigm for humanity, a framework he himself lived by all his life: …let us stand by our duty, fearlessly and effectively. Let us be diverted by none of those sophistical contrivances wherewith we are so industriously plied and belabored - contrivances such as groping for some middle ground between the right and the wrong, vain as the search for a man who should be neither a living man nor a dead man - such as a policy of “don’t care” on a question about which all true men do care…. Neither let us be slandered from our duty by false accusations against us, nor frightened from it by menaces of destruction to the Government nor of dungeons to ourselves. Let us have faith that right makes might, and in that faith, let us, to the end, dare to do our duty as we understand it.

To be able to achieve this, and in my vocabulary, to play human in his role as a speechmaker, Lincoln was crafty and exercised artistic genius. As his law partner William Herndon noted in his biography of Lincoln, “No former effort in the line of speech-making had cost Lincoln so much time and thought as this one” (2015, volume II: chapter 5). Apparently, he took meticulous care in everything he uttered. Even as a boy, he had “uncommon determination to express his thoughts in the best way” (Barzun 1960: 15). In all modes of communications, whether court defenses, political letters, speeches, or addresses on utterly important national issues, he displayed “precision, vernacular ease, rhythmical virtuosity, and elegance” (Ibid.: 48). Above all, he was a master at combining brevity and wholeness. He was aware of this skill, and he might have seen it as the reason for his success: “This is not a long letter, but it contains the whole story” (Cited from Ibid.: 28). One great motivator was his ambition. As he puts it himself: “Every man is said to have his peculiar ambition.” His was to be “truly esteemed by my fellow men. By rendering myself worthy of their esteem” (cited from Brookhiser 2014: 44). For Lincoln as a statesman with a vision, the issue of slavery was directly linked with saving the Union not for reasons of state, but rather because of his reading of the views of the American Founding Fathers, who for him had created a polity dominated by a combination of

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“freedom and openness.” This in turn directly related to debates about whether non-white people were fully human. In his words, it really: [d]epends upon whether a Negro is not or is a man. If he is not a man, why in that case, he who is a man may, as a matter of self-government, do just as he pleases with him. But if the Negro is a man, is it not to that extent, a total destruction of self-government, to say that he too shall not govern himself ? … When the white man governs himself that is self-government; but when he governs himself, and also govern another man, that is more than self-government—that is despotism. (Cited from Brookhiser 2014: 115, italic in the original)

For Lincoln, the link between the meaning of America and what the Founding Fathers stood for, and what he felt his generation must now stand for, was contained in the message of the Declaration of Independence. He thought the issue of slavery put that message to the test and that his generation was failing to handle it properly. Note the following passage, which not only indicates his position, but displays his civility also: I do oppose the extension of slavery because my judgment and feelings so prompt me; and I am under no obligation to the contrary. If for this you and I must differ, differ we must…. Our progress in degeneracy appears to me pretty rapid. As a nation we began by declaring that “all men are created equal.” We now practically read it, “all men are created equal, except negroes.” When the Know-Nothings [an anti-immigrant political group of the time] get control, it will read, “all men are created equal, except negroes and foreigners and Catholics.” When it comes to this, I shall prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty—to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy. (Letter to Joshua Speed, Springfield, Illinois, August 24, 1855)

To me, though, the pre-eminence of his statesmanship shows itself in his famous “Gettysburg Address” (delivered on November 19, 1863), which, precisely due to his brevity, captures the complete message and ideals of not only Lincoln, but also modernity and the worldview of human-immanence: Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth, upon this continent, a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that “all men are created equal.”

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Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of it, as a final resting place for those who died here, that the nation might live. This we may, in all propriety do. But in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow, this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have hallowed it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here; while it can never forget what they did here. It is rather for us the living, we here be dedicated to the great task remaining before us -that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they here gave the last full measure of devotion -that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth. (Italic added)

According to Lincoln, those who lost their lives did not do so “in vain” but rather for the sake of a “new birth of freedom,” like the first freedom in the Declaration of Independence not just for Americans, but for humanity and for the creation of a land of “hope and new life,” and in his own words: “for all coming time—not only for the millions now in bondage, but for unborn millions to come” (cited from Harris and Tichenor 2010: 335). This speech also summarized his understanding of the Founding Fathers’ intentions, which had led to the establishment of freedom, while now the civil war was threatening it. I agree with his recent biographer that “Lincoln’s Founding Fathers… were lawgivers. They believed in sheet anchors and axiom: they had laid down the law of liberty, based on human nature” (Brookhiser 2014: 142). One can particularly observe and appreciate Lincoln’s nuanced understanding of the human rights of slaves in his Peoria Speech of October 16, 1854. He opposed the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, which mandated “popular sovereignty” for the settlers of any territory make decisions for themselves, not based on “national or general interest” but on local or collective concerns. He opposes slavery because it is contrary to moral laws, but also because it is contrary to the very spirit on which the United States is founded. He offers a summary outline of American history until his time to demonstrate his point. It is a long speech; I would like to highlight a few key sentences:

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I particularly object to the NEW position which the avowed principle of this Nebraska law gives to slavery in the body politic. I object to it because it assumes that there CAN be MORAL RIGHT in the enslaving of one man by another…. I object to it because the fathers of the republic eschewed and rejected it. The argument of “Necessity” was the only argument they ever admitted in favor of slavery…. Thus, we see the plain unmistakable spirit of that age, towards slavery, was hostility to the PRINCIPLE, and toleration, ONLY BY NECESSITY…. Let no one be deceived. The spirit of seventy-six and the spirit of Nebraska, are utter antagonisms; and the former is being rapidly displaced by the latter. (Capital words are in the original)

It is interesting to note that Lincoln repeatedly refers to the Founding Fathers and recounts the events of American history to shape his argument about the threat of war and calamity. He sought to preserve the Union while also fighting for the liberation of the slaves because both projects served the human condition. The end of this speech is also insightful, sobering, and yet sad because of the persistence of those who deny the human condition. He claims that some Americans behave as though “we do not know that we ever had a revolutionary war, or such a chief as Washington. To deny these things is to deny all human axioms or dogmas and frustrates all logical arguments. If a man will stand up and assert, and repeat, and re-assert, that two and two do not make four, I know nothing in the power of argument that can stop him.” As stated before, modernity mandates that each of us takes part in deciding what we consider the good or our value system to be, including the existence or non-existence of God and the implications for society. The main reason is that we are the authors of and sole players in the civitas of modernity. This is what modern political and philosophical thought has expounded over the past few centuries. But Lincoln eloquently expressed modernity’s message in the last phrase of this important speech of fewer than 250 words and less than three minutes’ duration: “we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth” (italic added). I was not surprised to see him described in a recent biography as follows: “Socially, he [Lincoln] belonged to the democratic mass, and the life he had chosen to pursue was climbing the ladders of democratic politics and litigation” (Brookhiser 2014: 4). The centrality of law (the social

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contract) and democratic politics (peoples’ presence) comprise the very basic tenets of modernity’s civitas. One final aspect of Lincoln’s statesmanship relates to the thing he did not say and the measures he did not take. The best example is his frustration with General George G. Meade (1815–1872). He wanted to fire him; he wanted to say things to him. He refrained, however, because he knew this would make the General resign, which would have been detrimental to the national interest at the time, as he understood it. So, he contemplated what he wanted to say and composed a letter, but neither signed it nor sent it. Among other things, he wrote: You fought and beat the enemy at Gettysburg; and, of course, to say the least, his loss was as great as yours—He retreated; and you did not; as it seemed to me, pressingly pursue him; but a flood in the river detained him, till, by slow degrees, you were again upon him. You had at least twenty thousand veteran troops directly with you, and as many more raw ones within supporting distance, all in addition to those who fought with you at Gettysburg; while it was not possible that he had received a single recruit; and yet you stood and let the flood run down, bridges be built, and the enemy move away at his leisure, without attacking him…. Again, my dear general, I do not believe you appreciate the magnitude of the misfortune involved in Lee’s escape—He was within your easy grasp, and to have closed upon him would, in connection with the our other late successes, have ended the war– As it is, the war will be prolonged indefinitely. (July 18, 1863, Lincoln, never sent, nor signed)

In short, Washington made the union of the United States of America and Lincoln saved that union. It is not surprising that Washington was honored by titles like “godlike,” “first in everything,” and “the father of the nation,” and Lincoln as “honest Abe,” “Christ in miniature,” “God’s instrument,” “purer than Washington,” and “the savior of the union.” Just note how the verb “to save” appears five times in the following important and short famous passage from Lincoln: If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that. What I do about slavery, and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union; and what I forbear, I forbear because I do not believe it would help to save the Union. (Letter to Horace Greeley, 22 August 1862)

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In the Gettysburg address and in the passage above, we see a man who focuses on his role as an officer of the political, but then as an officer of civitas he showed his true self, particularly in the second inaugural address. Here, the war is moving toward victory for the Union, he has achieved emancipation, and in a way, he is a victor, yet as we read in the following passage, he is the embodiment of a humble guardian and manifestation of presence: With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation’s wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan- to do all which may achieve and cherish a just, and a lasting peace, among ourselves, and with all nations…. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces; but let us judge not that we be not judged. (March 4, 1865)

This passage not only captures Lincoln’s role as the savior of the polity and civitas, it summarizes the transformation of a shy man who alternated between exuberant self-confidence and deep depression and displayed traces of racism, into a person of presence. When Lincoln discovered he had a talent for public life, he used it to perform human in the arts of honesty, forbearance, humility, steadfastness, and unpretentiousness. Through self-discipline, he developed the crafts of reading, writing, speaking, law, military science, strategy, and above all patience. Charnwood’s evaluation is strikingly accurate: “Lincoln… grew to his task [from] … a man who started by being tough and shrewd and canny and became very strong and very wise, started with an inclination to honesty, courage, and kindness, and became, under a tremendous strain, honest, brave, and kind to an almost tremendous degree” (1917: chapter 7: 147).

Ethos: Libertatis, Isonomy, Novus Ordo Saeclorum What lies at the core of the ethos, social imaginary, rules of the game in the union that Washington created, and Lincoln saved? The immediate phrase that comes to mind is “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” The second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence states it plainly and clearly, as follows:

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We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That, to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That, whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government. (Italic added)

The triumvirate of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness precisely captures the ethos of not only the United States but the modern civitas itself. The first item, life, signals the shift from the holiness of being into the secular or human-immanence world, by sanctifying ordinary life. This is a result of what Max Weber calls disenchantment in his classic essay “Science as a Vocation.” In his words, “The fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, by the ‘disenchantment of the world.’ Precisely the ultimate and most sublime values have retreated from public life either into the transcendental realm of mystic life or into the brotherliness of direct and personal human relations” (1946: 155). Taylor describes this occurrence as “the great dis-embedding,” a revolution that turned humanity in a completely opposite direction. Humanity must no longer look for “the path,” as discussed in Chapter 5, attuning itself to it and living within its bonds, but rather can devise and formulate its own parameters and make its own lifeworld. Ironically, one of the main contributors to this change was the religious reformation that encouraged Christians to find the “holy…within ordinary life itself” instead of in lives devoted “supposedly to ‘higher’ vocation of the monastic life.” The main objective of life became the “affirmation of the value of life, of succouring life and sustaining it” (Taylor 2007: 369–370). In other words, the question worth considering is now humanity itself, and in a sense, humanity has become a question for itself. This view is better known as the philosophy of secularity and modernity, and in my words “human-immanence.” In this new condition, “we feel a new freedom shorn of the sacred, and the limits it set for us, to re-order things as seen best…. A great energy is released to re-order affairs in secular time” (Ibid.: 80). The Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the Religious Reforms, and the Industrial Revolution changed humanity’s mode of life production from cultivation of the resources of nature “to making” almost ex nihilo, not creatively in the way God creates, but in the sense of creating something

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new that was not there before. The more the new mode became dominant, the more this new artificial surrounding formed a human earthly condition where even an educated person has a hard time understanding the devices used in their daily life. This represents a paradigmatic shift in human mythology, from divine to human. The American scholar of mythology Joseph John Campbell (1904–1987) argues how in the age of modernity Libido triumphed over Credo. For him, Libido means a strong impulse for secular life. This accentuates the human individual, in contradistinction to the monolithic features of a divinely transcendent world. The opposite condition is “no-life,” in which one has not lived and experienced according to individual desire and will. The novel Babbitt by the American novelist, short story writer, and playwright Harry Sinclair Lewis (1885–1951) offers relevant insights. It depicts the life of a real estate agent called George F. Babbitt. Unlike George, his son has become a modern soul, deciding for himself what he wants to do with his life in the world and in secular time. While other people object to this, Mr. Babbitt not only supports it but encourages his son to dare to follow his bliss and do what he wants, unlike himself. The novel ends with the following advice he gives to the son: … I’ve never- Now, for heaven’s sake, don’t repeat this to your mother, or she’d remove what little hair I’ve got left, but practically, I’ve never done a single thing I’ve wanted to in my whole life! I don’t know if I’ve accomplished anything except just get along. I figure out I’ve made about a quarter of an inch out of a possible hundred rods. Well, maybe you’ll carry things on further. I don’t know. But I do get a kind of sneaking pleasure out of the fact that you knew what you wanted to do and did it. Well, those folks in there will try to bully you, and tame you down. Tell’em to go to the devil! I’ll back you. Take your factory job, if you want to. Don’t be scared of the family. No, nor all of Zenith. Nor of yourself, the way I’ve been. Go ahead, old man! The world is yours!

The last phrase captures the spirit of modernity and of honoring life in American ethos; the world is yours and you have one life to live, so make it into what you want it to be.1 This is the key concept. The verb “to 1 A warning is in order. If one is not vigilant, then the world decides that one must be for the world. Who are the most revered people? In the past, they were the royalty and aristocracy; now, they are the rich and the popular, i.e., the successful mercenaries of popularity and wealth! Some of the most talked about names in the first decades of the

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make” emerged as the central notion for the age of revolution against the old order. The presupposition was that humanity does not need to conform to any a priori set of standards; it can and should create its own world. This requires a new definition of the self and its relation to itself, to the other, and to the world. In Taylor’s words, “we experience our world and the human condition … as autonomous subjects, beings who revel in choice, as citizens among others in a sovereign people, as potentially in control of history” but of course “in the context of the great cultural changes new understandings of self, agency, time, society which western modernity has generated” (2007: 573). In other words, this phenomenon has been applied to all spheres of the human lifeworld. Comprehensive, concurrent, and convivial process of civilization has become a global occurrence. Its comprehensiveness not only applies to the various areas of human material production but includes humanity the world over. Unlike the pre-modern civitates that were local or at most regional, the new one is global. In the words of Kenneth W. Thompson, “Universal patterns of modernity are affecting all mankind. Modernization spans diverse values, institutions, traditions, and religions” (1966: 92). Or as he puts it elsewhere: “Man, who for millennia was confined to his tribe or neighbourhood, has broken through boundaries of locality, sates and nation” (1981: 43). The centrality of ordinary life thus is truly a global phenomenon, both geographically and in its subject matter. While its initial spark was in Europe, nowhere has it become as much a part of the creed of the ethos as in the United States, where a good portion of the world’s population has wanted to migrate to for the sake of a better life! In fact, I should note that the triumvirate of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness is a deliberate modification of a phrase that appears in a different form in the major works of the pillars of “Social Contract Theory.” For example, in Locke’s work The Two Treatises of Civil Government, it is “Life, Liberty and Property.” Here, we read: “The state of nature has a law of nature to govern it, which obliges every one: and

new millennium include Oprah Winfrey, Tiger Woods, and Bill Gates; that is, the highest celebration is of worldly success rather than affirming of ordinary life as experienced by the individual. The Bible attributes to Jesus the notion that believers “are not of the world, just as I am not of the world” (John 17:16). This applies to the modern soul, in that if the cosmological persons “belonged” to God, the modern souls “belong” to themselves and not the world.

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reason, which is that law, teaches all mankind, who will but consult it, that being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions” (1988, Book II, chapter 2, Section 6). One can easily deduce how these natural laws, understood by reason, were transformed in the mind of Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) and were reflected as self-evident truths in the Declaration of Independence to the effect “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” One very important point is that this modification should not be taken as minor. Considering the spirit of modernity, with its great disenchanting and dis-embedding “that gave an unprecedented primacy to the individual” (Taylor 2004: 50) or advocated a “naked self” (Berger et al. 1973: 213), it is more accurate to insist on the individual “pursuit of happiness.” Property as a category, and I would even say as a social and political institution, has long been with humanity. I can authoritatively confirm the sacrosanct and public status of this institution in Muslim history and political thought (Rodinson 1973), but it is common knowledge that it is well regarded and even publicly guarded in most traditions (Bethell 1999). Once again, for the Founding Fathers, particularly Jefferson, who had lived in France in a crucial time (August 1784–September 1789) and observed the Third Estate’s vote on May 5, 1789, that marked the beginning of the revolution, the “pursuit of happiness” can include any public concern; property may or may not be a component of it. Now, the issue of the desirability of happiness in ordinary life lies beyond the scope of this book, but thankfully it has been addressed elsewhere (see, e.g., Sandel 2012). For the rest of my account of the civitas of modernity, I will explore how this triumvirate has manifested itself in the American ethos. To promote, to maintain, to uphold, and to endure ordinary life requires imaginative ideas and workable and institutional pillars. Within the American context, I contend that the three pillars of “Libertatis, Isonomy, and Novus Ordo Seclorum” so far have been relatively successful. They constitute a practical triumvirate formulated by Founding Fathers as the ethos and improved by later statesmen. As just one example beyond Washington and Lincoln, one could think of the “civil rights” bills passed by the 37th president of the United States, Lyndon Johnson (1908–1973).

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I will begin my parsing of this triumvirate with Libertatis, starting with Patrick Henry’s (1736–1799) immortalized phrase “give me liberty or give me death.” Henry was a lawyer, planter, politician, and delegate to the Second Virginia Convention, which opened on March 20, 1775, where he gave a fiery speech that was effective in encouraging Virginia to participate in the revolutionary wars. What is impressive to me is that he was motivated not by antagonism or animosity toward Britain, but by the fight for freedom. In his words: “Has Great Britain any enemy, in this quarter of the world, to call for all this accumulation of navies and armies? No, sir, she has none.” He continues: “Sir, we have done everything that could be done to avert the storm which is now coming on. We have petitioned; we have remonstrated; we have supplicated; we have prostrated ourselves before the throne and have implored its interposition to arrest the tyrannical hands of the ministry and parliament. Our petitions have been slighted; our remonstrances have produced additional violence and insult; our supplications have been disregarded; and we have been spurned, with contempt, from the foot of the throne!” So, he concludes that the only course remaining was active resistance. In the last few phrases of his speech, he comes to his core, life-changing idea: “What is it that gentlemen wish? What would they have? Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!” Here is the key question. What does liberty mean or, rather, what did the Founding Fathers mean by it? The French diplomat, political scientist, and historian, Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–1859) was a keen observer of the American ethos and experience. His observation about freedom best describes the Founding Fathers’ understanding of it: They “loved it because they loved the pleasure of being able to speak, to act, to breathe unrestrained, under the sole government of God and the laws. He who seeks freedom for any thing, but freedom’s self is made to be a slave” (Tocqueville 1856: 204). It seems that the Founding Fathers understood freedom as something that, in Arendt’s words, “could exist only in public; it was tangible, worldly reality, something created by men to be enjoyed by men rather than a gift or a capacity, it was man-made public space” (Arendt 1990: 120). The second aspect of the American ethos relates to notion of “isonomy,” that is, equality of all people in their relationship toward one another, and most importantly, their equality before the social contract

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or the law. This is different from innate equality or inequality. Obviously due to the uniqueness of each human being and the presence of free will, or what I have referred to as “open software,” human beings cannot be equal. The notion of isonomy suggests instead an artificial condition of equality. Isonomy combined the Greek isos, meaning equal, and nomos, meaning law or custom, and thus as a combined concept mean equal standing before the law. Hannah Arendt is correct to say that the public sphere, whether in the ancient polis or in today’s state, is distinguished because it knows only “equals” (1958: 32). And this equality has no qualification. The Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset (1883–1955) has an apt point when he claims that the most significant transformation of the twentieth century has been The Revolt of the Masses (1993), by which he means that “ordinary people” have become players and citizens in the public sphere. I think Lincoln understood this well when he expressed his understanding of the Declaration of Independence and the intention of Founding Fathers, particularly when speaking about equality between and for all people: I think the authors of that notable instrument [The Declaration] intended to include all men, but they did not intend to declare all men equal in all respects. They did not mean to say all were equal in color, size, intellect, moral developments, or social capacity. They defined with tolerable distinctness, in what respects they did consider all men crated equal- equal in ‘certain inalienable rights, among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.’ This they said, and this meant. They did not mean to assert the obvious untruth, that all were then actually enjoying that equality, nor yet, that they were about to confer it immediately upon them. In fact, they had no power to confer such a boon. They meant simply to declare the right, so that the enforcement of it might follow as fast circumstances should permit. They meant to set up a standard maxim for free society, which should be familiar to all, and revered by all; constantly looked to, constantly labored for, and even though never perfectly attained, constantly approximated, and thereby constantly spreading and deepening its influence, and augmenting the happiness and value of life to all people of all colors everywhere. The assertion that ‘all men are created equal’ was of no practical use in effecting our separation from Great Britain; and it was placed in the Declaration, not for that, but for future use. (Speech at Springfield, June 26, 1857, in response to Stephen A. Douglas’s speech on the Kansas-Nebraska Act, two weeks earlier, italic in the original)

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The movement that captured isonomy has been known in America since 1920s as the struggle for an Equal Rights Amendment, and not natural equality or for its own sake, let alone any special privileges for any group. Even in his famous speech, former slave, writer, and the abolitionist, Frederick Douglass (1818–1895) is asking for affirming “the equal manhood of the Negro race” (delivered on July 4, 1852). The struggle for this status continues with its message of opening equal opportunities in all spheres of the political (education, economy, employment, politics, culture, and society), all relating to “human dignity,” or what Thompson has called “the ultimate justification of democracy,” because democracy “is the one political system that seeks in a comprehensive way to institutionalize human dignity—politically and spiritually as well as materially and socially” (1981: 210). He laments, however, that it may have become a lost horizon (Ibid.: 119–137). The recent movement, “Black Life Matters” (2020) to me, precisely objects to the fact of the blindness of the police and the systemic racism to the isonomy of the Black people. The central aim that American polity seems to be the guardian of the civitas of modernity relates to its aims contained in both triumviri of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” and “Libertatis, Isonomy, and Novus Ordo Saeclorum.” Note how the following passage of Lincoln’s message to Congress about how he understood the meaning of the civil war captures this meaning: This is essentially a people’s contest. On the side of the Union it is a struggle for maintaining in the world that form and substance of government whose leading object is to elevate the condition of men; to lift artificial weights from all shoulders; to clear the paths of laudable pursuit for all; to afford all an unfettered start and a fair chance in the race of life. Yielding to partial and temporary departures, from necessity, this is the leading object of the Government for whose existence we contend. (July 4, 1861)

The promises enumerated there still resonate with the people who migrate to the United States from all over the world, even walking on foot northward from Mexico and South and Central America and southward from Canada, despite recent, dare I say, “un-American” measures against immigrants and newcomers. The good news is that these waves of hostility are

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part of the saga of the American ethos, as against the Irish, Catholics, and others in the past, but I have confidence that even this shall pass away.2 The third aspect of the American ethos relates to “Novus Ordo Saeclorum,” one of two mottoes on the Great Seal of the United States. Charles Thomson, a Latin expert and secretary of Congress who was involved in the design of the Seal, translated the phrase as “a new order of the ages.” But what does this mean? “Exceptionalism” is a notion that is often applied to the United States, which in the context of the conversation about the civitas of modernity suggests that it is truly an exception in human history. I have mentioned that the worldview of human-immanence has had historical examples, but it has never become a dominant ethos for any polity, let alone a civitas, but now in the United

2 The poem “Even This Shall Pass Away” by American poet Theodore Tilton (1835– 1907) is a good reminder:

Once in Persia reigned a king; Who upon his signet ring; Graved a maxim true and wise; Which, if held before his eyes; Gave him counsel at a glance; Fit for every change and chance; Solemn words, and these are they; “Even this shall pass away. Trains of camels through the sand; Brought him gems from Samarkand; Fleets of galleys through the seas; Brought him pearls to match with these; But he counted not his gain; Treasures of the mine or main; “What is wealth?” the king would say; “Even this shall pass away.” Mid the revels of his court; At the zenith of his sport; When the palms of all his guests; Burned with clapping at his jests; He, amid his figs and wine; Cried, “O loving friends of mine; Pleasures come, but do not stay; ‘Even this shall pass away.’” Lady, fairest ever seen; Was the bride he crowned the queen; Pillowed on his marriage bed,; Softly to his soul he said: “Though no bridegroom ever pressed; Fairer bosom to his breast; Mortal flesh must come to clay—Even this shall pass away.” Fighting on a furious field; Once a javelin pierced his shield; Soldiers, with a loud lament; Bore him bleeding to his tent; Groaning from his tortured side; “Pain is hard to bear,” he cried; “But with patience, day by day; Even this shall pass away.” Towering in the public square; Twenty cubits in the air; Rose his statue, carved in stone; Then the king, disguised, unknown; Stood before his sculptured name; Musing meekly: “What is fame?; Fame is but a slow decay; Even this shall pass away.” Struck with palsy, sore and old; Waiting at the Gates of Gold; Said he with his dying breath; “Life is done, but what is Death?;” Then, in answer to the king; Fell a sunbeam on his ring; Showing by a heavenly ray; “Even this shall pass away.”

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States, it has become the ethos of a polity that has extended its ethos as a truly global phenomenon. Although I have expressed my disagreement with Fukuyama about his claims about the “end of history,” the fact that it is being debated at all is a major achievement of the secular worldview. In the end, the Constitution of the United States came to embody a new order, focusing on protecting the people, republicanism, and liberty. Its principles have been reiterated and explained by presidents in their inaugural addresses and other public pronouncements. Here is how Washington worded it in his first Inaugural address: “the preservation of the sacred fire of liberty, and the destiny of the Republican model of Government, are justly considered as deeply, perhaps as finally staked, on the experiment entrusted to the hands of the American people” (April 30, 1789). Jefferson calls it “the voice of the nation” and describes it as “a wise and frugal Government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned” (March 4, 1801). And in his third inaugural address, Roosevelt echoes and indeed cites Washington’s words, adding that “America has been the New World in all tongues, to all peoples, not because this continent was a new-found land, but because all those who came here believed they could create upon this continent a new life— a life that should be new in freedom” (January 20, 1941). On March 4, 1861, almost on the eve of the Civil War (April 12, 1861—April 9, 1865), Lincoln offered a comprehensive explanation of the new order, in which again the people, the federal system, and liberty are emphasized: I shall take care, as the Constitution itself expressly enjoins upon me, that the laws of the Union be faithfully executed in all the States. Doing this, I deem to be only a simple duty on my part, and I shall perform it so far as practicable unless my rightful masters, the American people, shall withhold the requisite means or in some authoritative manner direct the contrary…. All the vital rights of minorities and of individuals are so plainly assured to them by affirmations and negations, guaranties, and prohibitions, in the Constitution that controversies never arise concerning them. (italic in the original)

I would like to emphasize again that this ethos has taken form within the context of an official religion, but not a state religion. The phrase “one nation under God” is recursing across all levels of government and

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politics in American history. Like the kings of the Achaemenids, American presidents have all expressed their reverence for God, seeing him as having granted America its success. This passage from Washington is typical: “Every step, by which they have advanced to the character of an independent nation, seems to have been distinguished by some token of providential agency” (April 30, 1789). It might be useful to remember here Taylor’s assessment of the place of religion in the civitas of modernity: “This is the new space for God in the secular world. … [T]he disappearance of an ontic dependence on something higher can be replaced by a strong presence of God in our political identity” (2004: 193).

Theater: The Nation, the Citizens, the Entrepreneurs I have already referred to the theater of modernity’s civitas as the state, comprised of “Sovereignty, People (nation), Boundaries (territory), and Government (constitution).” Here, I want to rely on one of the intellectual fathers of modernity, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, to re-emphasize this: The public person… formed by the union of all other persons was once called the city and is now known as the republic or the body politics. In its passive role it is called the state, when it plays an active role it is the sovereign and when it is compared to others of its own kind, it is power. Those who are associated in it take collectively the name of a people, and call themselves individually citizens, insofar as they share in sovereign power, and subjects insofar as they put themselves under the laws of the state. (The Social Contract, Chapter 6, italic added)

I would have edited the last phrase to “insofar as the rules of the game in the state protect and afford them opportunities to appear in the political.” Spatial and temporal circumstances afford opportunities differently. I concern myself with the case of the United States, and I have found Arendt’s On Revolution insightful for understanding the way its federalism has taken form. The first aspect of the new polity of modernity relates to “national sovereignty,” combining the first two elements of the modern state. The new state is free from any other worldly (tradition, elders, and so on)

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or meta-worldly (metaphysical) authority because it represents the will of the nation. Unfortunately, state is sometimes used synonymously with popular sovereignty, which convolutes the issue. National sovereignty results from the politics of public consent because of a grand dialogue among all people, while popular sovereignty results from the politics of plebiscite and populism. I have already mentioned Lincoln’s stance against the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 mandating “popular sovereignty” of the settlers of a territory. National sovereignty decides the fate of the political regime, which for the United States was a federalist system comprised of the distinct yet interrelated branches: legislative, executive, and judicial. To me, the process of the election of the President of the Republic shows the difference between “national sovereignty” and “popular sovereignty.” On the surface, there is a lengthy, open, and transparent campaign culminating in a direct vote that determines who will assume the role. The Electoral College, however, a sophisticated and by some accounts confusing institution, has a mitigating effect, ensuring that popular sovereignty does not compromise national sovereignty. Another indirect function of this institution is the peaceful transfer of power, a regular and routinized function. The will of national sovereignty in the hands of the Founding Fathers was to create a constitution, which appeared to be the product of the American Revolution, but was simply the inauguration of the old idea of the social contract into a pact that now serves as the locus of the polity. For national sovereignty, the social contract became the framework of the new constitution or, in short, the rule of law. Hannah Arendt captures the idea fully: “The notion of constitutional government is of course by no means revolutionary in content or origin; It means nothing more or less than government limited by law, and the safeguard of civil liberties through constitutional guarantees, as spelled out by the various bills of rights which were incorporated into the new constitutions and which are frequently regarded as their most important part, never intended to spell out the new revolutionary powers of the people but, on the contrary, were felt to be necessary in order to limit the power of government even in the newly founded body politic” (1990: 143). On the surface, the new constitution imposed limits, but in reality, it empowered all to be active in generating more power for themselves, hence the prominence of ideas of competition and balance of power. James Madison (1751–1836), the fourth president, devoted Federalist 51 to the idea of the power checks and balance between the various

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powers with the new polity. One principle of any society that functions horizontally relates to reverence for the power of people. The system functions to preserve the integrity of each part and their working together. As Madison wrote, in such a system “The interest of the man, must be connected with the constitutional rights of the place.” Thus, Madison writes in Federalist 14: “Were it proposed by the plan of the convention, to abolish the governments of the particular states… [and] if they were abolished, the general government would be compelled, by the principle of self preservation, to reinstate them in their proper jurisdiction.” But the opposite is true as well, in that in a horizontal context, each may harm the other, and so he wrote in later part of Federalist 51: “It is of great importance in a republic, not only to guard the society against the oppression of its rulers; but to guard one part of the society against the injustice of the other part.” What worked in favor of the new constitution was the concrete and practical experience of early colonies like Connecticut, whose Fundamental Orders of 1639 evolved into “the Civil Constitution of this State” and still functioned as an “Act containing the Abstract and Declarations of the Rights and Privileges of the people of this State.” The first section of the act declares its content as “the Civil Constitution of this State under the sole authority of the people thereof, independent of any King and Prince whatever” (italic added). The sole authority of the people came to mean the government “of, for, and by the people,” as has been immortalized by Lincoln. And for Lincoln, the logical conclusion was to insist that the government and its officers are the servants of the people: “I freely acknowledge myself the servant of the people, according to the bond of service–the United States Constitution; and that, as such, I am responsible to them” (letter to James C. Conkling, Washington, August 26, 1863, to be read in the meeting of the Union supporters Springfield, Illinois, on September 3, 1863). This conviction was not new; Lincoln held it before assuming the role of the highest officer of the constitution. Consider his “Lyceum Address” of January 27, 1838, which he delivered as a lawyer in the aftermath of the mob burning of a Black man two weeks earlier. He uses that tragedy to compare constitution and law with mob. “Turn, then, to that horrorstriking scene at St. Louis…. A mulatto man, by the name of McIntosh, was seized in the street, dragged to the suburbs of the city, chained to a tree, and actually burned to death; and all within a single hour from the time he had been a freeman, attending to his own business, and at

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peace with the world. Such are the effects of mob law…. There is no grievance that is a fit object of redress by mob law.” Then, he engages in a discussion of how the Founding Fathers formulated the constitution to preserve the “pillars of freedom” and ends his speech with the following words, that not only point out the significance of the constitution, but serve as a fitting conclusion to this section: Reason, cold, calculating, unimpassioned reason, must furnish all the materials for our future support and defence.–Let those materials be moulded into general intelligence, sound morality, and in particular, a reverence for the constitution and laws: and, that we improved to the last; that we remained free to the last; that we revered his name to the last; that, during his long sleep, we permitted no hostile foot to pass over or desecrate his resting place; shall be that which to learn the last trump shall awaken our WASHINGTON. (italic and capital letters in the original)

Now, if national sovereignty owns the polity and conducts its affairs, individual citizens are masters in the social sphere, where civil rights, civil societies, and civic cultures enjoy freedom and protection. It is important to note that in modernity the definition of citizen has sometimes expanded to include everyone by the mere birth of a person in the legal borders of modern polity. In the United States, along with some other countries, this has meant that even children born to non-citizens are automatically citizens and enjoy its privileges and should bear its responsibilities. The first two amendments to the constitution guarantee the free and open society that I have described as central to the civitas of modernity. The First Amendment prohibits Congress from ratifying any law that might restrict freedom of conscience (religion), freedom of speech, press and publication, peaceful assembly, and petitioning against the government of the day. The second amendment protects the right to keep and bear arms. While national sovereignty has the authority to impose laws that may limit citizens for the management of the affairs of the polity, it does not have the authority to disarm them, because “the right to revolt” is one of the innate rights of the nation. Here, the distinction between the hierarchical society of non-modern civitates and the horizontal context of modern civitates confronts each other. We have seen how in the civitates discussed in the last two chapters, hierarchical social classes shaped

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each society, but each citizen, at least in theory, is the center of existence. The relation of each to the center of artificially set institutions and organizations is equidistant and also maintains direct access. In Taylor’s words: “A purely secular time-understanding allows us to imagine society horizontally. … This radical horizontality is precisely what is implied in the direct access society, where each member is ‘immediate’ to the whole” (2004: 157). To guarantee that horizontality, freedom, and openness must become concrete principles, this in turn requires practical measures such as meritocracy, transparency, and formalized and impersonal relationships. Again, in Taylor’s words: “Each of us is equidistant from the centre…. We have moved from a hierarchical order of personalized links to an impersonal egalitarian one” (Ibid.: 158). The sense of equidistance applies to the economy as well. If in the political sphere the main player is the sovereign nation, at the sociocultural level, citizens assume that role in the economic sector and individuals with entrepreneurial spirit should be the main players. “Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” have economic manifestations in the form of entrepreneurship. The constitution must cater to it, encourage it, and sustain it. In an influential book entitled An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States (original published in 1913), the American historian Charles Austin Beard (1874–1948) argued that American federalism is an economic machine for the protection of the interests of the wealthy Founding Fathers who wanted a system to protect and uphold their wealth and social status. In his words: “The movement for the Constitution of the United States was originated and carried through principally by four groups of personalty [sic] interests which had been adversely affected under the Articles of Confederation: money, public securities, manufactures, and trade and shipping” (2004: 324). There may be some truth to this thesis, but I think it is too narrow reading of “the new order of ages” and its pillars life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, because understanding them within the sanctification and even glorification of ordinary life logically leads putting emphasis on the economy. This philosophy has created the most prosperous economy in human history, containing layers from every innovative wave. Capitalizing on industrial changes, the powerful agricultural sector transformed itself to focus on industrial cultivation, and recently, following the advent of the information revolution, the farming of information, so to speak, has become the primary economic activity. In terms of production, the American economy

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is agrarian, industrial, and now digital and computerized. In terms of trade, it is a commercial economy combining those three layers. This is not surprising, given that since World War II, “a great transformation,” in the words of the economic historian Karl Polanyi (1994), has made the American economy the master of society instead of its servant. The disembedded soul, the naked self, and the free modern demand an economic system that satisfies the necessities of the body and the ever-increasing desires of the mind. Entrepreneurship provides a system where the individual entrepreneur is the true actor and player, whether personally or in corporate form. Consider how at the peak of the power of the auto industry in the United States, Charles Erwin Wilson (1890–1961) made the following statement, demonstrating my point: “For years I thought that what was good for our country was good for General Motors, and vice versa. The difference did not exist” (italic added). In 2020, the owner of Amazon.com could make similar claim. Thus, also it was no surprise that during the economic crisis of 2008, America saved the most successful entrepreneurs of the time, with the logic being that they were too big for America to sustain their failure, even if it meant spending trillions and not billions. The theater, then, is the arena for the naked self as a free economic entrepreneur, a free political player, and a free socio-cultural citizen, able to pursue, maintain, and expand their life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness. ∗ ∗ ∗ While re-reading this chapter, I thought about how I might conclude it, but unlike my process in the other two chapters, I did not imagine or daydream. I did not need to: I undertook graduate studies in the United States from mid-1970s to mid-1980s; I have traveled to the States as a scholar participating in many conferences, lectured in American graduate classes from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s, and have been closely observing American politics and society from Ottawa, Canada, since the mid-1990s. I witnessed the resignation and then pardoning of a president—Richard Milhous Nixon (1913–1994)—while a graduate student of Political Thought and Political Science and I have observed two impeachments—William Jefferson Clinton (b. 1946) and the presidency of Donald John Trump (b. 1946), particulary the bizarre way of his leaving office in 2021—and have observed how in those cases expediency almost inhibited the correct course of action.

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It has been challenging to remain as objective, calm, and distant as I was when assessing the other two civilizations. One reason is precisely because of those familiarities, which positioned me too close to the American civitas. A more immediate reason relates to the fact that I am writing these words when America is in the grip of three striking crises: Accidentally, in my judgment, someone has assumed the office of president who lacks both the patriotism and personal attachment to America of Washington or that of Lincoln. In the first section of the book, I made a distinction between capitalism and mercantilism. President Washington was a capitalist and remained one even while he was the highest officer of the land and in fact employed his capitalism at the service of his office. In contrast, President Trump is a mercantilist who is using the office at the service of his mercantilism. Meanwhile, the United States is in the grip of the COVID-19 pandemic without proper leadership, which has led also to its greatest economic hardship, which might ultimately be even worse than the Great Depression. What has kept it going thus far has been the enormous economic boom of the information revolution, which has made America the richest polity on earth. Thirdly, the country is also in the grips of a cultural divide in terms of race relations, ironically during and in the aftermath of the election of Barack Hussein Obama (b. 1961), the first Black president in American history (in office for two terms, 2009–2017). I am finishing this chapter during the week of the murder of George Floyd, an innocent Black man who died of asphyxiation from sustained pressure when his neck and back were compressed by Minneapolis police officers during his arrest on May 26, 2020. In fact, I have just finished watching the evening news report about demonstrations not only in more than 140 cities in the United States but in many places throughout the world against this injustice. Could I ignore all these, rise above these accidents, and draw some general observations about the American civitas? I would try my best! I would like to repeat what I mentioned before: The American experience is an enormous human achievement and for me the pinnacle of the civitas of modernity, yet it is not free from the dangers of the reductionism of modernism and the threat of being overtaken by the appetite for power and dominance, which is endemic to the very idea of modernity. The French philosopher Michel Foucault, who voices the generally accepted view that modernity revived the heritage of Greece and Rome, attributes this to different sources: “One should not forget that, generally speaking, the Roman model, at the Enlightenment, played a dual role: in

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its republican aspect, it was the very embodiment of liberty; in its military aspect, it was the ideal schema of discipline” (1995: 146). I think, however, he has failed to see the danger of the very message of modernity for sanctifying and even glorifying the “ordinary life,” thus tending to overplay the needs of the body (labor) and the want of the mind (work) at the price of underplaying the aspirations of the soul (action). The heroic action of humans to atone for the disasters of the past and initiate new beginnings that encourage presence in the political is reduced to spectacles of human appearance, popular context, and the highest number of “likes” on Facebook or Twitter. Indeed, due to an overemphasis on power, prosperity, and popularity, modernity has created monstrous injustices. The following observation by Schweitzer is strikingly prescient, given that at the time he wrote, modern civilization has not yet displayed the atrocities that followed, such as World War II, Holocaust, long wars and destruction in Bosnia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and other places: “Who can describe the injustice and cruelties that in the course of centuries they [the people of color] have suffered at the hands of Europeans?… If a record could be compiled of all that has happened between the white and the colored races, it would make a book containing numbers of pages which the reader would have to turn over unread because their contents would be too horrible” (Schweitzer 1923: 199). I am aware that in its best moments, modernity has enhanced “life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness.” This, however, is only arbitered by and measured against human dignity secularly defined, the freedom of others, and pragmatism that is directed at increasing efficiency and the bottom line. It is not surprising that the most prevalent trends of thought and practice in the modernity and the United States strive to guarantee negative freedom, utilitarianism, and pragmatism. In other words, the dominant impulse is to resist restraints on the “naked self,” even if warranted by the latest scientific findings, whether about the environment (pollution and the carbon footprint) or human health (e.g., pandemics). The goal is the highest pleasure for the highest number of people and the least pain for smallest number of people, which means pursuing measures that lead to efficiency. Consider how President Gerald Ford (1913–2006) pardoned Nixon for the sake of expediency, even though the legal system had proved him guilty of breaking the sanctity of his office, and how in the impeachment of President Trump, Congress has been guided by expediency and not pragmatism, despite the fact that it is obvious that

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the highest office of the land has been compromised and misused. I understand expediency as a last resort for dire circumstances, always shortsighted. If Lincoln were motivated by expediency, he would never have delivered the “House Divided Speech” of June 16, 1858, when accepting the Senate nomination in the Republican State Convention. As was his practice, Lincoln read the speech to his law partner William H. Herndon (1818–1891) before delivering it. Herndon considered Lincoln morally courageous but politically incorrect, but Lincoln delivered the speech, nevertheless. As Herndon predicted, it cost him the election, but he did the right thing, and doing the right thing was the principle at stake. Lincoln was guided by conviction and reason, not expediency: “I have told them that a house divided against itself cannot stand, and Christ and Reason say the same.”3 Now, could I imagine myself living in and being part of the success story that is the United State? I am afraid for as far as making my home there might go, I could not, but as a visitor, I will always be honored to experience a place made so amazing by the working together of “openness and freedom.” I have been lucky enough to visit many times over the past few decades, and I hope to do so again. I have had the honor of participating in the great conversation about the human condition and of experiencing the great minds the modernity civitas has produced in highly significant institutions of learning and research from Cambridge (Harvard University) in the East to Los Angeles (University of California) in the West, and from Chicago (the University of Chicago) in the North to Austin (the University of Texas) in the South, along with many other great places in between. For me, these exemplify the spirit of the modern civitates that is the United States of America. In the final analysis, my main objection here is not so much against the impressive and admirable American experience as it is against the process of modernity, with the stains such as Holocaust, Nazism, mental health, and human loneliness, which stem from its reduction of humanity and the 3 This speech is also significant in that Lincoln shows the distinction between “pragmatism” (prudence) and “expediency” (opportunism). The first demands that one be a realist, which means weighing all aspects of existing resources and shortcomings, while the second sees only short-term gains and scoring of points. Realism is different from what I call factualism. Factually, the United States is the richest nation, but COVID-19 has shown that when reality sets in, this does not mean much. Modernity works successfully and in balance if one is a realist; if not, then it is reduced to modernism and ideology of turning modernity into instrument of power.

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world into mechanical processes, instruments and success. Commenting on the experience of slavery in the modern world, Braudel points to “indifferent to human sacrifice, operating by the almost mechanical logic of” the world economy of modernity, so dominated in the United States (1981, Volume 3: 393).

Sources Cited Arendt, Hannah. 1958. The Human Condition. Chicago: Chicago University Press. ———. 1990. On Revolution. New York: Penguin, Reprint. Bacevich, Andrew J. 2008. The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism. New York: Henry Holt and Company, LLC. Beard, Charles Austin. 2004. An Economic Interpretation of The Constitution of The United States. Mineola, NT: Dover Publications Inc. Berger, Peter, et al. 1973. The Homeless Mind; Modernization and Consciousness. New York: Random House. Bethell, Tom. 1999. The Noblest Triumph: Property and Prosperity Through the Ages. New York: Palgrave. Bloom, Allan. 1987. The Closing of the American Mind. New York: Simon and Schuster. Braudel, Fernand. 1981. Civilization and Capitalism; 15th to 18th Century. Translated from the French and revised by Sian Reynolds. 3 Volumes. London: William Collins Sons and Co. Ltd. Brookhiser, Richard. 2014. Founders’ Son; A Life of Abraham Lincoln. New York: Basic Books. Charnwood, Lord. 1917. Abraham Lincoln. Beverly, MA: Garden City Publishing Company. Elias, Norbert. 2000. The Civilizing Process; Sociogenetic and psychogenetic Investigation. Translated from the German by Endmund Jephcutt, with some notes and correction by the author. Edited by Eric Dunning, Jordan Goudsblom and Stephen Mennel. Oxford: Blackwell, Revised edition. Ferling, John. 2002. Setting the World Ablaze: Washington, Adams, Jefferson, and the American Revolution. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gasset, Josse Ortega. 1993. The Revolt of the Masses. New York: W. W. Norton, reprint. Lewis Harry Sincair. 1922. Babbit. New York: Haricourt, Brace and Company. Mackie, John Milton. 2006. The Administration of George Washington. Edited by Frank E. Gizzard Jr., Buena Vista, Virginia: Marina Publisher. Niebuhr, Reinhold. 1952. The Irony of American History. New York: Charles Scribner’s and Sons.

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Polanyi, Karl. 1994. The Great Transformation; the Political and Economic Origins of our Time. New York: Beacon Press, first edition 1944. Rodinson, Maxime. 1973. Islam and Capitalism. Translated from the French by Brian Pearce. New York: Pantheon Books. Sandel, Michael J. 2012. What Money Can’t Buy? The Moral Limits of Markets. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. Schweitzer, Albert. 1923. On the Edge of the Primeval Forest. London: Black. Taylor, Charles. 2004. Modern Social Imaginaries. Durham: Duke University Press. ———. 2007. A Secular Age. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Thompson, Kenneth W. 1966. The Moral Issue in Statecraft; Twentieth-Century Approaches and Problems. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University. ———. 1981. The President and the Public Philosophy. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. Toner, J.M. (ed.). 1888. Washington’s Rules of Civility and Decent Behavior in Company and Conversation: A Paper Found among the early Writing of George Washington. Washington, D. C.: W. H. Morrison. Weber, Max. 1946. From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology. Translated, Edited and with an Introduction by F. H. Greth and C. Wright Mills. New York: Oxford University Press. Williams, William Appleman. 1959. The Tragedy of American Diplomacy. Cleveland: World Publishing Company.

CHAPTER 8

Final Thoughts

One moment gives you wing, the next moment ties you down – One moment offers you dawn, the next moment dusk Rumi (Sonnet 539: 6) Civilizations are complex things. For centuries they can flourish in a sweet spot of power and prosperity. But then, often quite suddenly, they can tip over the edge into chaos. Ferguson 2011: 44

Writing this conclusion has been very perplexing and taxing on me. I have written books and articles and translated many works from English into Persian and from Persian into English, which is to say that I am not unfamiliar with writing conclusions. So, it was not for lack of knowledge, skill, or style in the craft of writing that I had difficulty, but instead because of the subject matter. In this book, I have attempted a meditation on the “introvertive” and “extrovertive” journeys of humanity. I have called the first Presence and the second the Political. This distinction is well known in the Iranian worldview (Seyer-e Anfossi va Afaaqi). The first taxes one’s soul and the second one’s mind. The first relates to the domain of self-exploration, meditation, and introspection, while the second that of gaze, observation, and argument with of © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 F. Rajaee, Presence and the Political, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59487-9_8

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external affairs of the world, including dealing with others (ethos) and with handling of the means and structures of the world (theater) as well as how they intrinsically interact and work together both in tension and in harmony, at the same time. Presence guarantees our unique individuality and ideals of joy, serenity, and wisdom, and the combination of ethos and theater facilitates our collective ideals of safety (not harming ourselves), social norms (not violating the legal framework), and moral standards (keep a sufficient level of morality). Often, these spheres appear incompatible, hence schisms of various forms: the individual vs. society, private vs. public, and so on. My hope has been to capture moments when this schism vanishes or loses its intensity and allows for a cohesive joining of the two journeys. As the passage cited above from Rumi warns, these moments are not mechanical, created for once and for all, but rather are precarious, requiring vigilance and prudence to maintain cohesion between the two journeys: “One moment gives you wing, the next moment ties you down– One moment offers you dawn, the next moment darkness.” Timing is crucial: One must seize the moment. This is the power of “now” when we think, speak, and act with awareness. But who is “we?” An African proverb states “it takes a village to raise a child.” Variations of this aphorism are found in many cultures and traditions. It captures the conclusion I draw from the contents of this book, pointing to the practical implications of civility and civitas. Still, who constitutes the village? Where does responsibility lie? The proverb suggests another triumvirate: community, nurturing, and the individual. On the surface, community comes first, but it begins with the individual and only later becomes the orchestra of community, hence the main title of the book Presence and the Political. There is a caveat in that I mean an individual who dares to embrace life as contingency and embark on a journey of uncertainty. There is nothing interesting or dignified in the powerful desire in humanity for certainty and security. Just as we seek unity within diversity through toleration, respect for freedom, and upholding of civil liberty, it is possible to display civility within the strong urge of passion for absolutes and lustful desire to make a living instead of making a life worth narrating. And this happens when “ethics of responsibility” guides our individual actions in every step of the way. Nurturing and education, as explained in Chapter 4, focus on perception, knowledge, and authenticity. The first fosters the attitudes that make

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it possible to undertake a chosen profession in paradoxical world of individuality, collectivity, and universality. “Knowledge” facilitates training the individual to meet the requirements of the job. “Authenticity” offers mentoring to develop the sense that one is always doing the right thing, yielding fulfillment and actualization. As an example, an educational program that comes close to what I have described is the Erasmus Program initiated by the European Union in 1987. Named after the Dutch humanist monk Erasmus of Rotterdam (1466–1536), its aims to include encouraging “individuals’ positive perception of the value of learning for their professional and personal” flourishing, increasing “the acquisition of skills and competences, thereby increasing employability,” and fostering “positive social/civic behaviour and a sense of feeling ‘European’” (European Commission 2018: 3). In fact, a 2015 document called the Paris Declaration aimed at “promoting citizenship and the common values of freedom, tolerance and non-discrimination through education” has given sharper focus to the Erasmus Program, defining the broad aim of education as follows: “The primary purpose of education is not only to develop knowledge, skills, competences and attitudes and to embed fundamental values, but also to help young people—in close cooperation with parents and families- to become active, responsible, open-minded members of society” (pdf version is available on the WWW, retrieved May 10, 2020). I hope it has become clear that enhancing presence and the political, which in turn gives rise to civility and performing human, is worth the price of constant vigilance. At least over half the population must promote, protect, and practice vigilance constantly. This is a mental exercise in which we leave our species’ natural cave to be enlightened and then return to the cave as guardians of civil production. The Iranian scholar, poet, statesman, and historian Mohammad Taqi Bahar (1884–1951) has an insightful poem narrating a conversation between a monarch and a 90-year-old farmer who is planting the seed of a tree that needs a decade to bear fruit. When the king reproaches him for being greedy and acting in vain since he may die any moment, the response is insightful and relevant: “Oh glorious king, said the farmer—by seeding, never will people suffer; others have seeded so we could enjoy—we will seed so that others will enjoy.” Civilization production is a process that one begins, but one cannot control or predict the end, and it is a continuous process. As I have shown, a magical, creative, and imaginative human consciousness

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and a deliberate decision to perform human lead to civility and civilization production. The paradox is that these are not the product of any cultural or social engineering. Indeed, notions of cultural and social engineering are oxymoronic. Rather, culture and society grow due to individual determination to perform human. As Adam Ferguson wrote more than a century ago, “progress in civilization emanates from the individual Moral-Mental Organism, through development of its moral senses conscience and sympathy, spreading from the individual over the whole race” (1889: 57). Do all citizens follow the more than a dozen triumviri that I mapped out in the first four chapters? The answer is both yes and no. Yes, because if enough conscientious people follow them, they become the dominant paradigm in each society, or they become part of the social imaginary and the very moral fabric of the society. Meanwhile, when too many people either break these rules or do not take them seriously, a civilized context is precarious. Consider the notion of multiculturalism as a paradigm for integrating new citizens into the life of the Canadian civilized context. I read in it the essence of the triumvirate comprised of “Particular, Collective, and General” that I treated in Chapter 3 on the etiquette ethos or the rule of the game. The architects of multiculturalism wanted to include the will of the particular groups in relation to the will of collective if and when that group attained a majority, without undermining the will of the general public in Canada. Some groups have used this policy to secure special privileges and maximize the interests of their group. In other cases, the ruling group has used it as a device to impose policies and gain support for particular practices. For instance, when the province of Quebec in Canada conducted a study of how to integrate new citizens and called it “reasonable accommodation,” even before engaging with some of the specifics of the problem, I felt the essence of what I discussed as “isonomy” was undermined. If citizenship is universal suffrage, then one cannot separate citizens into groups where one group “accommodates” another group. The conclusion I draw from this example is that the triumviri I have canvassed throughout this book are crucial for maintaining civility and civilization, provided any one of them is utilized to the measure or the proper dosage, which makes a world of difference. “All things are poison, and nothing is without poison. Only the dosage distinguishes the killer from the cure.” How well this loose translation from German of the German-Swiss scientist Paracelsus (1493–1541) expresses my point. The right measure will lead to civilization and the wrong one

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will lead to exploitation. Thus, the notion of PET that I described earlier, and that has come to mean “caress,” requires the right dosage. If I have been successful in making a persuasive argument for the desirability as well as the possibility of living a civil life, what are the practical steps? Does it require an individual act, or does it require a coordinated collective effort? I began this book with reference to the debate over the nature of the Enlightenment. Here, I would like to return to that debate. The most famous phrase from that discussion was “Dare to know” (Sapere Aude), taken from the poetry of the Roman poet Quintus Horatius Flaccus (65-8 BCE, better known in English as Horace) and immortalized by Immanuel Kant. To become enlightened, one needs to “dare” to acquire truth and knowledge. History neither affords us a tabula rasa nor imposes a fait accompli. If history is seen as a fait accompli, it deprives the contemporary generation of all imagination, ingenuity, and innovation. If it is taken as a tabula rasa, it deprives us from the gift of all the wisdom, experience, and the endeavors of the past generations. What is significant is that history presents both challenges and opportunities for us to modify and rethink our human condition. My tripartite notions are not and should not be considered an instruction manual, license, recipe, easy formula, panacea, or magic potion that if only implemented would ensure all would be well and nice. Rather, they present a host of clues and inklings, a road map, general guide, and lodestar, for future generations to make their own way. They present general wisdoms, not precise instructions. In the words of the German anthropologist Adolf Bastian (1826–1905), they point to “elementary ideas” that can help one initiate one’s own creativity. There is a tradition among Hasidic Jews that relates to this paradox: “Invent your own religion or it means nothing to you; follow the religion of your parent or you lose it.” To paraphrase this for the process of civilization production: Invent your own civilization or it will not make sense to you, pay close attention to the clues of the past or it will not bear fruit. This amazing process can occur for anyone who dares to take the chance to begin something. This movement from the natural to the civilizational sphere takes one out of one’s domesticity and to unknown realms. It will take one out of exclusivity and envelopment in one’s peculiar, parochial, and narrow closed world to an open space of dialogue and interaction.

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Some critical readers may object to the central role and responsibility I assign to the individual in the emergence, maintenance, and the fall of a given civilization. Any institution can only work as well as its individual members. It is true that a collective is bigger than the sum of its parts and it is true that a good institution enhances everyone, but a more insightful and accurate observation is that a chain is only as strong as its weakest link. It is true that strong individual members have strength, but it is magic that when the members work in balance and cohesion, then they can produce something larger than their sum. I think Schweitzer’s observation is very apt here: “The collapse of civilization has come about through ethics being left to society. A renewal of it is possible only if ethics become once more the concern of thinking human beings, and if individuals seek to assert themselves in society as ethical personalities” (1987:328). There is also a danger in assigning too great a role to individual agency. I began this book with my irritation and sadness about the condition of uncivility and non-developing on the part many people or societies that are busy conquering or are on holiday from history. In fact, that disappointment may have made me appear too enthusiastic about the human ability to make a polity and then to save it by turning it into a civitas. Again, I hope my theoretical portrait of the moments of civility and civilization does not leave the impression that performing human, making presence in the political, and creating civility and civilization can be a mechanical project. That would be falling into the trap of modernism that I described in the final section of the previous chapter, where I pointed out that the founding of modernity on human will bear the innate risk of corrupting the process of modernity, with its emphasis on human freedom, ingenuity, and reason, with the ideology of modernism, reducing those three values into power, money, and utilitarian rationality. Modernism believes in social, cultural, and political engineering, something contrary to the very essence of the human condition of spontaneity, action, and the paradox of individuality/plurality. The peak of such a mentality manifested itself in Nazism, which believed in the possibility of “totalitarianism,” “pure race,” “final solution,” supremacy of the “super Aryan man,” whose disastrous project led to the gas chambers of the Holocaust in an act of absolute “othering.” Despite these disasters, I am not suggesting that we should go back to the time of tradition-based civitates and revive their ethos of obligation/devotion, integration, and righteousness. Tradition tends to

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reduce the cosmological worldview and value system into an ideology of traditionalism, demanding emulation, conformity, and ritualism. The exclusionism of Brahmanism in ancient India and the religion inquisition of medieval Catholicism in Europe left similar negative stains on human history. As the American historian of Christianity Jaroslav Jan Pelikan Jr. (1923–2006) once wrote (1984), and later elaborated on: Tradition is the living faith of the dead; traditionalism is the dead faith of the living. Tradition lives in conversation with the past, while remembering where we are and when we are and that it is, we, who have to decide. Traditionalism supposes that nothing should ever be done for the first time, so all that is needed to solve any problem is to arrive at the supposedly unanimous testimony of this homogenized tradition. (Carey,1989: 57)

To paraphrase Pelikan, modernity is the dynamic faith of modern souls; modernism is the mechanical instrument of the modernist exploiter. While there might be some short-term benefit for traditionalism and modernism, what we truly need is for tradition and modernity to be in conversation with each other. Machiavelli—in his capacity as philosopher and not angry and annoyed politician—reminds us that we need two elements to make the political facilitate human presence and make possible performing human. He terms them Fortuna and Virtu and discusses the role they play in human history. The former could be compared to the tradition or enchantment we have inherited as humans from the divine, from our forebears, and from our cultural context, while the latter relates to human disenchantment, dis-embedding, ingenuity, spontaneity, and daring to embrace change. It is interesting to note that even though Machiavelli is considered one of the fathers of modernity, he ascribes a larger role to tradition. In his words: “I hold it to be true that Fortuna is the arbiter of onehalf of our actions, but that she still leaves us to direct the other half, or perhaps a little less” (The Prince, Chapter 25). If we take Fortuna as the persistent elements of the past and Virtu as the pressing demands of the present and the future, then our heroes who want to have presence in the political need to engage seriously with the sophisticated workings of another triumvirate: “human agency, Fortuna and Virtu.” They would be best served if, armed with this triumvirate, they made the benediction famous in Christianity as the “serenity prayer” part of their motto: “God, give me grace to accept with serenity the things that cannot be changed,

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Courage to change the things which should be changed, and the Wisdom to distinguish the one from the other.” I wonder whether the heroes we have encountered in this book— particularly Cyrus, Darius, Babur, Akbar, Washington, and Lincoln—were armed with these triumviri and were not somehow aware of this important benediction. My journey with them over the past few years, which has been as much pleasant, enthralling, and filled with serendipity as it was accompanied by frustration, anger, and disappointment, has convinced me that they were indeed both armed with the triumvirate and aware of the benediction in some formulation. I would even venture to say that they were the embodiment of what Thompson has summarized as the special quality of a leader in the following passage: “For as he moves across perilous terrain, the political leader must be cautious yet courageous, moral yet practical, inspiring yet effective, consistent yet experimental, and in tune with domestic and international politics” (1981: 211). I have not always had evidence that my chosen heroes possess all qualities, and so have sometimes relied on my scholarly hunches. But I found in Lincoln, especially something close to this ideal, which makes me hopeful that my intuition throughout has been right. In his “Reply to Emancipation Memorial Presented by Chicago Christians of All Denominations” urging him to move quickly on the emancipation of slaves, Lincoln wrote the following: “[I]t is my earnest desire to know the will of Providence in this matter. And if I can learn what it is, I will do it ! These are not, however, the days of miracles, and I suppose it will be granted that I am not to expect a direct revelation. I must study the plain physical facts of the case, ascertain what is possible and learn what appears to be wise and right” (September 13, 1862, italic added). This encapsulates, I think, the attitude of all my heroes. All of them navigated in the human condition of possible and right and I feel they managed to act wisely on the side of the right with all the world of the possible offered them. With the presence each displayed in the political, my dearest wish would be to have dinner with each of them and to enjoy their presence as their polities and civitates experienced them.

Sources Cited Carey, Joseph. 1989, June 26. “Christianity as an Enfolding Circle [Conversation with Jaroslav Pelikan],” US News & World Report, 106: 25.

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European Commission. 2018, January 31. “Report from the Commission to the European Parliament, the Council, The European Economic and Social Committee and the Committee of the Regions; Mid-term Evaluation of the Erasmus+ program (2014–2020),” Brussels EC, pp. 1–8. Ferguson, Adam. 1889. An Essay on the History of Civil Society. With a New Introduction by Louis Schneider. London: Transaction Publisher. Second printing 1991. Schweitzer, Albert. 1987. The Philosophy of Civilization. Translated by C. T. Campion. New York, NY: Prometheus Books in Cooperation with The Albert Schweitzer Fellowship. Thompson, Kenneth W. 1981. The President and the Public Philosophy. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press.

Index

A Abd ar-Rahman I (731–788), 115 Achaemenids, 159–162, 165, 167, 169–171, 174–179, 182, 183, 185–189, 191, 205, 213, 218, 220, 252 Ain-i-Akbari, 212, 215 Akbar, Abu‘l-Fath Jalal-ud-Din Muhammad (1542–1605), 195 din-i-Ilahi, 206, 208 ‘ebadat khana, 206, 221 mahdar, 205 solh-i-kol , 209 ‘Allami of Agra, Abulfazl (1551–1602), 199 Amin, Samir (1931–2018), 186 Andalusia, xxiv, 36 Arendt, Hannah (1906–1975), xx, xxi, 33, 50, 60, 61, 62, 69, 80–84, 103, 104, 105, 109, 116–120, 125, 136, 137, 144, 145, 151, 153, 247, 248, 252, 253 Aristotle eudaimonia, 15, 112

friendship, 21, 130 Nicomachean Ethics , xxii, 15, 21, 34, 101, 112, 130 The Politics , 91, 101, 130 Armstrong, Karen (b. 1944), 211 Asabiyah, 146–148 Ashnan, 161, 162 Athens, 4, 9, 16, 26, 181 Authenticity, 74–77, 79, 86, 98, 152–154, 264, 265 Avesta, 171–173, 180, 185

B Banipat, Battle of, 197 Beard, Charles Austin (1874–1948), 256 Behistun Inscription, 184, 185 Bentham, Jeremy (1748–1832), 29 Berlin, Isaiah (1909–1997), 118, 119 The Bible, xxi, 20, 164, 235, 245 Bloom, Alan (1930–1992), 152, 226, 228, 235 Bozeman, Adda B. (2017), 160

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 F. Rajaee, Presence and the Political, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59487-9

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274

INDEX

Braudel, Fernand (1902–1985), 52, 261 Buber, Martin (1878–1965), 78, 79, 149, 151 Buddha, Siddhartha Gautama, 24, 37, 60, 75 Burckhardt, Titus (1908–1984), 90 C Campbell, Joseph (1904–1987), 62, 63, 244 Canada, xvi, 23, 93, 133, 134, 139, 145, 146, 227, 249, 257, 266 Charvaka, 206, 216, 221 Chinese, 21, 70, 171 Christians, xxi, 22, 115, 183, 206, 217, 243, 270 Churchill, Winston, 127 Cicero, Marcus Tullius (106–43 BCE), 147 Civilization. See Civitas Civilizing process, 232 Civitas “concomitant, comprehensive and convivial”, 38 definition, xx, 22 mutual fecundation, 36 pillars, xxii, 42, 194, 213 Clash of civilizations, 35 Communist Manifesto, 107, 220 Condillac, Étienne (1714–1780), 116 Conqueror with a vision, xxiv, 115, 161, 162, 170, 194, 196, 198, 228, 232, 233 COVID-19, 2, 188, 258, 260 Cyrus, the Great (601–530), 159, 161, 164, 165, 173 D Dalai Lama, the 14th (1925–), 51 Dara Shikuh (1615–1659), 209

Darius, the Great (550–487 BCE), 108 Delhi, 194, 196–198, 200 Descartes, Rene (1596–1650), 40 Development conquering, xvi, 75, 114 developing, xv–xvii, 76, 85, 111, 114, 129, 147, 148, 150, 191, 219, 221 on holiday from history, xvi, xvii, 114, 129, 150 Diderot, Denis (1713–1784), 151 Dignity, 32, 51, 109–111, 113, 182, 183, 201, 219, 249, 259 Din-I -Elahi (divine religion), 206, 208, 214 Divine-immanence, xxiii, xxv, 110, 159, 170, 171, 173, 175, 180, 192, 224 Divine-transcendence, xxiii, 170, 191, 192, 209, 210, 214, 215, 226 Durkheim, Emile (1858–1917), 92 Dworkin, Ronald (1931–2013), 98 E Easton, David (1917–2014), 103 Economy agrarian, 218, 219, 257 industry, 137 information, 137, 256 laissez fair, 140 market economy, 101, 139 tributary, 186, 218, 219 Education, 5, 40, 41, 72, 120, 121, 126, 132, 149, 150, 152–154, 194, 229, 235, 249, 264, 265 Elias, Norbert (1897–1990), 232 Enayat, Hamid (1932–1982), 214 Equality. See Isonomy Ethic ethic of civility, 14 ethic of responsibility, 28

INDEX

ethic of self-righteousness, 14 ethic of ultimate ends, 28 Ethos, xx, xxii–xxiv, 7, 40–43, 65, 86, 90–95, 97–99, 103, 106, 107, 109–115, 117–119, 123, 125, 126, 128, 136, 138, 139, 144, 145, 148, 153, 160, 166, 167, 169–171, 175, 179, 188, 191, 193, 194, 201, 205, 210, 213, 223, 228, 243–247, 250, 251, 264, 266, 268 all with me, 13, 38 altogether, 38, 92 F The Federalist Papers , 20, 235 Ferdowsi Tusi, Abul-Qâsem (940–1020), 180 Ferguson, Adam (1723–1816), 141 Foucault, Michel (1926–1984), 61, 258 Freedom affirmative, 19, 118–123, 126, 140, 143, 144, 226, 235 assertive, 19, 118–122, 126, 143, 235 Audete vos Liberare, 120, 145 Berlin’s distinction, 118 negative, 19, 119, 120, 122, 126, 140, 143, 144, 226, 235, 259 Fukuyama, Francis (1952–), 114, 251 G Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand (1869–1948), 54 Gasset, José Ortega y (1883–1955), 248 Gilgamesh, 25 The Good, xxii, 12, 15, 17, 22, 27, 32–34, 43, 66, 69, 130, 139, 150, 153, 228, 240, 249

275

Governance, 9, 29, 128–132, 146, 154, 165, 167, 168, 182, 189, 203, 225 Greeks Agora, 10 Athens, 4, 26 sophists, 2, 26, 27 Zeus, 69 H Hafez of Shiraz (1320–1389), 21 Hamann, Johann Georg (1730–1788), 116 Hammurabi (1810–1750 BCE), 169 Hayek, Friedrich (1899–1992), 120 Hegel, Georg (1770–1831), 160 Henry, Patrick (1736–1799), 247 Herder, Johann Gottfried von (1744–1803), 116 The Herodian, 97 Herodotus (484–425 BCE), 162, 163, 165, 166, 169, 170, 177, 181, 182, 186, 187 Hobbes, Thomas (1588-1679), 27, 41 Holocaust, 259, 260, 268 Horace (65-8 BCE), 267 Human being arrogance, 75 confident, 13 definition, 3 friendship, 21, 66, 69 Nowhere man, 55 “open software”, 248 raison d’etre, 3 reason. See Logos; Self-aware; Selfhood; Three dimensions; Timid Humboldt, Ferdinand von (1767–1835), 116 Hume, David (1711–1776), 125 Huntington, Samuel (1927–2008), 35

276

INDEX

I Ibn Khaldun (1332–1406), xviii, 18 Ibn Taymiyyah (1263–1328), 215 India The Bhagavad-Gita, 63 dharma, xxii, 17, 134, 171 The Laws of Manu, 17 tri-varga, xxii, 17 Upanishads , 17 Iran cultural revolution, 152 farr-i-izadi, 215 1979 revolution, 152, 180, 184 social classes, 179, 214 Iskandernama (Romance of Alexander), 204 Islam beginning, 205, 211 five pillars, 193 orthopraxy, 193, 206 Shari‘a-minded, 216 Isonomy, 33, 108, 109, 112, 135–137, 144, 242, 247–249, 266

J Jefferson, Thomas (1743–1826), 246 The Jews, 164 Jihad, 193, 211 Greater jihad, 193, 211 Lesser jihad, 193, 211 Johnson, Lyndon (1908–1973), 246

K Kant, Immanuel (1724–1804), 31, 32 Kierkegaard, Soren (1813–1855), 55 King Jr., Martin Luther (1929–1968), 107, 228 King of Kings, 180, 183, 186, 201, 204, 206, 216, 221

L Language, 8, 10, 36, 51, 95, 107, 115–117, 138, 150, 169, 178, 185, 194, 195, 201, 209, 213, 215, 221, 224 expressive element, 116 instrumental element, 116 Laswell, Harold (1902–1978), 103 the Laws of Manu, 17 Lewis, Clive Staples (1898–1963), 66 Lincoln, Abraham (1809–1865), 107, 228 The Little Prince, 90 Locke, John (1632–1704), 27, 32, 54, 116, 142, 143, 147, 170, 226, 227, 245 Logos, 70, 74, 85, 86, 114 Love, 12, 19–22, 43, 65–70, 77, 86, 102, 104, 109, 143, 145, 191, 199, 208, 215, 235 Lydia, xxiv, 162, 163

M Machiavelli, 131, 132, 226, 269 Fortuna and Virtu, 269 Making a life, 3–5, 7, 22, 23, 36, 39, 106, 109, 141, 264 Making a living, xvi, 3, 4, 22, 23, 106, 109, 132, 141 Mandela, Nelson (1918–2013), 122 Mann, Thomas (1875–1955), 117 Marduk, 164, 175, 176 Mashkoor, Javad (12971374/1918-1995), 180 Maslow, Abraham (1908-1970), 89, 109, 110 Maurya of India, 160 al-Mawardi, Abu al-Hassan (972-1058), 214 McIntyre, Alasdair (b. 1929), 16

INDEX

Mesopotamia, 25, 70, 127, 162, 167, 175, 181 Migration, 36, 111, 133, 213 Moors, 8, 36, 194 Alhambra, 8 Cordoba, 194 Morgenthau, Hans J. (1904-1980), 36, 131 Mughals din-i-ilahi, 214 farr-i-izadi, 215 jharokha Darshan, 211–213, 221 sabk-e-Hindi, 214 social classes, 215 solh-i-kol , 209 al-Mulk, Nizam (1018–1092), 184 Muslim, xxi, xxiii, 8, 10, 14, 18, 19, 21, 24, 115, 128, 133, 178, 184, 191, 193, 194, 201, 205–207, 209–212, 214, 217, 220, 246 Muslim world, xvii, xviii, 10, 37, 184, 201, 206, 207, 214

N Niebuhr, Reinhold (1892-1971), 1, 227 Nietzsche, Friedrich (1844-1900), 13, 54, 105 Nizami Ganjavi, Jamal ad-D¯ın (1141-1209), 205 Nomocracy. See The rule of law

O On holiday from history. See Development Ordinary life, 113, 243, 245, 246, 256, 259 “Other”, 147 Ottomans, 10, 178, 194 Otto, Rudolf (1869-1937), 2

277

P Padeshah (The Guardian King), 196 Paracelsus (1493–1541), 266 Pericles (495-429 BCE), 106, 131 Persia. See Iran Plato Alcibiades , 149, 150 dike, 15 forms, 20, 73 metaxy, 142 Symposium, 66, 68, 69, 142, 143 Polanyi, Karl (1886-1964), xix, 101, 105, 138, 257 The political, xv, xvi, xx, xxi, xxiv, 1, 20, 21, 26, 29, 54, 61, 92, 95, 102, 103, 106, 129, 132, 141, 142, 145, 159, 161, 162, 169, 171, 173, 174, 187, 191, 194, 199, 213–217, 219, 221, 225, 226, 229, 231, 236, 242, 249, 252, 253, 256, 259, 263, 265, 268–270 distinction with politics, 32 power, 54, 102 Politics, xvi, xxii, 9, 20, 35, 38, 102, 103, 106, 113, 118, 128, 132, 134, 135, 154, 171, 179, 202, 213, 214, 231, 235, 236, 240, 241, 249, 252, 253, 257, 270 Polity. See State (Polity) Protagoras (490–420 BCE), 16 Public sphere, xxii, 10, 11, 41, 54, 92, 100, 103, 105, 116, 119, 132, 137, 248 Q The Qur’an, xxi, 4, 14, 20, 63, 72, 110, 192, 193, 205, 207 R Rawls, John (1921-2002), 32

278

INDEX

Religion civil religion, 170, 171 official religion, 160, 170, 171, 175, 205, 210, 251 religious reforms, 226, 243 state religion, 170, 171, 205, 224, 251 Renaissance, 151, 223, 224, 226, 227, 243 Righteousness righteous deeds, 173–175 righteous thoughts, 172–175 righteous words, 173–175 Rogers, Mr. Fred McFeely (1928–2003), 60 Romans, 8, 10, 18, 70, 115, 147, 258, 267 Forum, 10 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques (1712-1778), 121, 147, 226, 252 The rule by law, 135 Nomocracy, 135 The rule of law, 108, 111, 112, 134, 135, 227, 253

S Sabk-e Hindi, 214 Sadr-Azam (chief minister), 180, 183 Safavids, 10, 178, 194 Samarkand, 196, 197 Saramago, Jose (1922-2010), 54–56 Sargon of Akkad (??-2279 BCE), 127, 167 Schweitzer, Albert (1875-1965), 5, 74, 79, 232, 259, 268 The self dis-embedded, 257 disenchanted, 37, 246 “naked”, 235, 246, 259 Self-aware, 56–59, 98 Selfhood, 64, 85

Shahnama (the Book of Kings), 180, 204 Shayegan, Darioush (1935-2018), xvi, 62 Smith, Adam (1723-1790), 137, 138 Society, xiii, xiv, xvi, xvii, xxiii, xxv, 6, 7, 9, 16, 19–22, 33, 35, 37, 38, 42, 55, 80, 81, 91–94, 100–102, 104–107, 111–115, 117, 123, 132, 134–139, 141, 143–145, 148, 154, 171, 183, 194, 204, 208, 211, 213, 217, 218, 224, 230, 232, 240, 245, 248, 249, 254–257, 264–266, 268 horizontal, 111, 137, 144, 254–256 vertical, 137 Socrates, 15, 30, 68, 69, 77, 80, 149 Spirit, 4, 5, 15, 24, 26, 43, 68, 69, 85, 86, 108, 111, 119, 123, 139, 154, 172, 199, 240, 244, 246, 256, 260 State (polity) busy conquering, xvi, 24, 268 elements of, 225 on holiday from history, 114, 147, 149, 268 sacred based, 127 strata, 50, 218 the worth of, 130 Statesman with a vision, xxiv, 161, 182, 199, 200, 236, 237

T Talibans, 24 Taylor, Charles M. (1931-), 38 Thompson, Kenneth W. (1921–2013), 62, 126, 141, 245 Three dimensions, 4, 26, 143 Timid, 13 Tocqueville, Alexis de (1805-1859), 247

INDEX

Toynbee, Arnold J. (1889–1975), xviii, 40, 95–98 Truth, 2, 12–14, 16, 21, 32, 34, 35, 77, 91, 100, 107, 138, 151, 171–173, 206, 210, 212, 216, 243, 246, 256, 267

U United States of America civil war, 133, 236, 239 The Federalist Papers , 235 the Founding Fathers, 227, 233, 236, 239, 246, 255 “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”, 242, 249 the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, 239, 253 The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 111, 183

V Vedas, 210 Vico, Giambattista (1688–1744), 147

W Washington, George (1732–1799), 228–236, 240, 241, 246, 254, 258, 270

279

Weber, Max (1864-1920), 28 Weil, Simone (1909-1943), 121 Welfare of mankind, 204, 205, 210, 213 Wilde, Oscar (1854-1900), 24 Worldview divine-immanence, xxiii, xxv, 110, 159, 170, 171, 173, 175, 192, 224 divine-transcendence, xxiii, 170, 191, 192, 209, 210, 214, 215, 226 human-immanence, xxiii, xxiv, 110, 170, 223–227, 238, 250 X Xenophon (431-354 BCE), 173 Z The Zealot, 96–98 Zoroastrianism Ahura Mazda, 173, 175, 180, 184 arta/asha, 171 “happiness” (Siyata), 172, 173 the Right, 173 threesome practical guide, 173 the Wrong, 173 Zoroaster, 172, 174 Zusya, Rabbi Meshulam, 55, 113