My Ecological Sermon On The Mount

When I view Jesus' parables, I always ask myself, like any good federalist, where is the sovereignty in the parable? To some extent I am certain Jesus himself understood these relationships of sovereignty. When challenged about paying taxes, he asked whose face was on the coin. In his parables, specifically, who is sovereign? What is sovereign, artificially so called, because it is taken for granted? What is sovereign because it has been lost, and now is found? Now by sovereign, I mean what holds power, sway, influence, gravity, importance, political sovereignty. What is priceless? Looking at his parables in this way, there is a certain joy attached to things that are earned. There is freedom and truth found in what grows, versus what is handed to a person.

Another way to put it is, what is arbitrary? This is the reverse of the viewpoint above. Things appreciated, or accomplished via an unearned method, are arbitrary. Ready made solutions. Makeshift solutions. Things and people taken for granted. Presumption.

The two questions are a counterpoint. One is evolutionary, ethical, natural, organic. The other is revolutionary, arbitrary, summary, and superficial. The whole of Jesus' teachings, as I understand them, used the former and evolutionary method.

One great example, a parable which I recently used in a short story on the dangers of arbitrarily genetically engineering honey bees, found here, is The Parable of the Weeds, as follows:

The kingdom of heaven is likened unto a man who sowed good seed in his field:

But while men slept, his enemy came and sowed tares among the wheat, and went his way.

But when the blade was sprung up, and brought forth fruit, then appeared the tares also.

So the servants of the householder came and said unto him, Sir, didst not thou sow good seed in thy field? from whence then hath it tares?

He said unto them, An enemy hath done this. The servants said unto him, Wilt thou then that we go and gather them up?

But he said, Nay; lest while ye gather up the tares, ye root up also the wheat with them.

Let both grow together until the harvest: and in the time of harvest I will say to the reapers, Gather ye together first the tares, and bind them in bundles to burn them: but gather the wheat into my barn.

I love this parable immensely. I comment on it here because it is illustrative of a point. This parable is not about the enemy who sows weeds. It is about the householder's rejection of his servant's suggestion that they pull up the weeds. Evil will be evil, sure, but the good servant shall not use revolution to fight the revolution that an enemy imposed upon them all.

In my short story, I modify the parable slightly, not only to bring forward that point above, but to show just how organic (in British English ecological) are Jesus' parables, especially this one.

The kingdom of heaven is like a man who sowed good seed in his field. When the wheat sprouted

and formed heads, the weeds also appeared. The owner’s servants came to him and said, ‘Sir, do

you want us to go and spread herbicides to kill the weeds?’ ‘No,’ he answered, ‘for while you

are killing the weeds, you will be damaging the wheat with them. This is an ecological crop. Let

both grow together until the harvest. At that time the harvesters will collect the weeds and the

wheat, sort and sift between them, and then bring the ecological wheat alone into my barn.

I have a garden, and I have four good rows of red Raspberries growing in it. It never fails that when I leave it alone a couple days, up sprout the weeds, all sorts of nettles and thistles. Because I am only concerned with a large portion of berries, I am not at all worried about the few I chance to harm and crush while pulling up the weeds. And so pull them up I do.

The same is true of the non-ecological farmer. Weeds grow, and to minimize these from the start, the farmer sprays out herbicide, killing them. What he also does with that herbicide, and pesticides when there are little creatures eating away at the crop, is damage the crop itself. 

What we are talking about here is 6 billion berries, and concern for every one, so much so that the householder refuses to arbitrarily tend them. The householder allows for weeds, because to summarily cut them down would also harm the grain.

Now I am sure some biblical interpretation may be applied to this. Some sorting and sifting of the wheat from the weeds in the afterlife. That's for somebody else. But me, I'm concerned with the here and now, and this parable is about ethical living. This is not a magical formula where you state "I believe Jesus died for my sins" and arbitrarily all things are better, get out of jail for free. In fact, according to the parable, such a statement is a quick fix that creates more trouble than not. It certainly doesn't improve upon a person's character, and may make the person feel psychologically certain that 

The parable, to me, is about not using arbitrary methods with others. I'll state that positively. It is about using evolutionary, earned methods of achievement with others. How many bosses have you liked that micro-managed what they didn't believe, yet you knew, you yourself were capable of? How many new magazines on the market go out and claim that they are great, rather than borrow somebody else considered great to get the person to vouch for them? Problem very few. They borrow sovereignty from others until they have earned their own. How many times have you turned down good advice because, even though it's exactly what you need, it wasn't asked for, and therefore oversteps some bounds of propriety? How many know-it-alls do you respect? Affectation is an attempt to appear more skillful than what one has actually earned. But I digress a bit.

The parable means going to the individual privately with your problem before going to him or her with a group of mutual friends, and that before going next with the "congregation". Going with the congregation from the outset, first, places the congregation, rather than the individual in question, first. It is arbitrary. It breaks the rule that the Sabbath (or congregation) was made for man, not man for the Sabbath (or congregation). If this is about the individual, then why do the harm of control. In essence, going to the congregation first is a means of controlling, arbitrarily, what you are unable to achieve by evolutionary, ethical means. If you enforce the solution with the congregation, summarily, immediately, arbitrarily, have you really solved it? If you solve things in this way, is it because you having gained the skill of solving it by going to the individual first?

Don't get me wrong as far as the relationship between individual and group. One ought to have devoted loyalty to the congregation, whatever healthy congregation it may be. The universe isn't so centered around the individual that he or she doesn't owe some time, resources and responsibility to the whole. But in the end, however important the group may be, it is always founded on the individual. Anything else is an arbitrary construction, and is doomed to fall to pieces under its own weight. I'll put the primacy of the individual in another light. The difference between Jesus' way of gardening and mine is that I love the bunch of berries, like China loves the Chinese, and so, a few are expendable when pulling up the weeds, spraying herbicide. Jesus on the other hand, loves the bunch of berries because he loves each berry, and therefore, none are expendable. That is the reality that is going to survive. But it requires that, for the sake of the wheat, weeds are allowed their time. Because the individual is sovereign.

And so, last time I looked, the world was full of berries, and also a bunch of weeds. Thank God.

With parables, let everyone interpret it his or her own way (lest it be an arbitrary one, ready made). Here's mine.

On a Real African Union

This afternoon I was following along on Twitter the @_AfricanUnion 's Pledging Conference. I couldn't help but pity the situation that the Union is in, the fact that the Union, or at least the desire for one, has not made African peoples any more prosperous. I'm sure it has done good in some ways, but I still see more or less than same crises, wars, famines, refugee camps and exploitation, day in, day out. So it got me thinking about African Union, a real one, and why there isn't one now.

Like the African Union, the United Nations was an attempt at all or nothing; a union of everyone, despite any conditions on what form of government or freedom from government a people might have. It was better to get all the nations together, it was thought, than it was to unite the democratic nations of the world, as a nucleus to a real world union. What this caused was such a diffusion of law that the nations (and the UN is of the nations, by the nations, and for the nations) got all sorts of maneuverability, veto powers and strategic power brokering, that it made nationalism (the very thing that creates the wars that the UN was trying to prevent) the primary driving force behind participation in the UN. When China and the Soviet Union, to give a good example, boycotted the UN, the western democracies had free hands to go in and launch a counter-offensive against the North Koreans (and through them China and the Soviets). Had they stayed for a vote (and history shows they learned this lesson QUICK), they would have said, no way, we don't want the UN interfering in the war between North and South Korea. Another example is the recent abstaining votes of China and Russia, which led the security council to vote for support of the rebels in Libya. There was no strategic value for these two veto power nations in Libya, a Mediterranean nation. But get closer to their borders, that is to say, Syria, and suddenly they are vetoing anything and everything. They, as nations, make money on arms deals to Syria, so that it is in their best interest to continue using veto powers in the UN again war against Syria.

But that is the price the UN paid for being so all-inclusive.

In this Libyan connection, Qaddafi himself wanted to eventually become President of the African Union. The African Union Constitution was written in Lybia. He was a strong proponent of the idea. This is not to slight the Union. He knew their was power in union, and he wanted it for himself. Though his intentions were less than noble, he wasn't the first to promote union. During my second course in African History, I wrote a short piece on the Fante Confederation. This short-lived union of tribal states in 1868 was to unite roads, armies, taxing and the voting system. These few essentials made it one of the first proto-federal unions of the African continent. It failed when the British (who mostly saw the union as a dangerous political entity, probably because of a former group of colonies that did the same) annexed the territory with the promise of defending the Fante from their enemies.

Simply put, there is strength in unity. So here I have argued for the weakness of all-inclusiveness, yet also state strength in unity. These need some reconciling, because it is here that a real African Union can happen. 

I'll simplify the issue. How can the democratic nations of Africa enter into real union with dictators who wish, ultimately, to maintain their own power over a nation? A union would, in such a case, as it is with China or the U.S. in the UN, use the Union mechanism for the ends of that one nation. That is because the UN is built, not on the people, but on the nation states.

The problem is a fundamental one. Suppose we set aside the African continent for a moment. Could the wild west of Arizona have united with the fledgling United States Government without first tackling its internal problems? Arizona, and especially the ghost town of Jerome, were famously the standard for wild western shootouts and gun-slinging. Arizona was the last territory to be admitted into the Union, I have heard, because of the wild lawlessness. In a real union however, the member states must be up to a certain standard of civility, freedom and self-governance. Unions take place for everyone's sake. That is, the union deals with union problems. This is why California does not have an embassy in France! It is part of a union that takes care of such things. That is why Chicago, a city as populous as Sweden, doesn't need to worry about having a military! It has, not a nation, but a nation of nations, concerned with military, postal, citizenship, monetary, and certain legal matters. Dictators, ruling over their dictatorships, or gun-slingers in wild Arizona for that matter, being largely self-interested, will only use such union mechanisms to further their own ends. And this is not the real union that California has by letting somebody else worry about embassies, that Chicago has by letting somebody else worry about armies.


Let's look at it in another way than civility and stability. The American Civil War was never a war between the North and the South. It was in the sense that people from the north fought people from the south. But it was a war between the South and the entire UNION of North and South. Again, this is self-determination, and the individual state placing itself before that of the whole, and in reality, placing itself before its own citizen.

If Africa wants a union, let it bring together the more stable democracies of the continent. Just a few. Let these four or five  or six stable nations write up on a couple pieces of paper a document that binds them to pool together their respective militaries, their currencies, their citizenship, their postal services into ONE, that promotes absolute free trade between them. And let this combined nation (and I mean, let this UNION do it, not the member states at the outset) write up a document concerning the rights of individuals. Having a singular and united court system, this collective bill of rights would not be the wishful thinking of the UN, but genuine law, enforceable. Fifty sovereign nations means 50 sovereign forms of law, which is lawlessness.

What better incentive for the populace of other African nations to overthrow their dictators, institute laws, checks and balances, and eliminate corruption, than the possibility and opportunity to join this union? That was the incentive that caused the Balkan states to join the EU, weak as it currently is. Individually, these states could never hope to defeat the Soviets, or the Russians, in a war (of bullets or of rubles). Collectively, however, Russia is no longer a threat, though it attempts with oil pipelines every now and then to throw around some muscle.

What a Union of African States would mean is that the citizens of this new union would now vote in their own state elections, as before, but instead of nations (as nations and for nations) manipulating an African Union for their own best but separate interests, this same collective citizenry would also vote in elections concerning the total body. The states would no longer need to concern themselves with currency, military, citizenship. Refugees from neighboring and warring nations, while they would pose practical issues on the ground for individual states, would be a federal level issue as far as solutions. The whole collective would solve such problems, and reduce the instability that such neighborhood conflicts cause.

These separate state economies would become increasingly stable, and without a military budget, could reinforce internal police and court systems, creating more order and freedom for the citizen. 

Objective B of Article 3 of the African Union Constitution states that the Union will work to "defend the sovereignty, territorial integrity and independence of its Member States." This, and this alone, is why the Union fails. Tribalism prevented nationalism, until the tribes united to overthrow colonial powers. Nationalism prevents the Union I'm talking about, and will continue to do so until the people grow tired of the constant threat of continuous breakdown, war, economic ruin, and personal interests over collective interests.

So the solution is this: start a NUCLEUS union. Let other nations join, so fast as they show themselves democratic and stable enough to do so.

The United States (all 13 of them) resolved this issue in 1787, and 37 other states joined them. The Australians, the Dutch, the British, all united their various territories. Union works. The EU is still quite skeptical of giving its citizens the right to vote on who is in and who is out of parliament. At this point, the nations decide. I would consider it a world of irony if the citizens of some former colonies in Africa beat them to the punch on the matter.

Hobbes and Locke: Two political Thinkers on Two Continents

When Swedes ask me where I am from (because it happens sometimes that my Swedish doesn't betray me), I tell them I am from Amerika, though it isn't my fault. I add the second half of the statement because I am not a nationalist. I had to be born somewhere. I happened to be born there. The chance of birth, thank God, has not shackled me altogether too much in a priori conventions and ideologies. I also add that second half for those sensitive souls who, depending on who is currently in the White House, grant me less social capital because of their own culturally self-evident ideologies.

This view to the chance of birth, while it has given me a margin of distance, has not eradicated my nationalism. It has however refined it some. That, combined with living in socialistic Sweden, has allowed for an honest critique and regular challenge of my political, social, and moral views.

As Nathaniel Hawthorne stated: "Human nature will not flourish, any more than a potato, if it be planted and replanted, for too long a series of generations, in the same worn-out soil. My children have had other birthplaces, and, so far as their fortunes may be within my control, shall strike their roots into unaccustomed earth."


I quote him not alone as part of my own experience, but because it is part of the process called globalization.

So here is a perspective, which has sort of solidified in my mind to date (though not enough that it isn't open to modification and critique) of a basic difference between the nation of North American known as the United States, and the collectivity of nations in the eurozone known as the European Union.


Without question, the ideas of Hobbes and Locke were highly influential in the directions modern political thought would take in both North America and Europe. We can state the obvious, that the United States followed after Locke’s “life, liberty, and property”, but there is a deeper relationship going on here. It might not be obvious―and it might not even be true!―but it seems to be possible to divide the two thinkers roughly between the two continents. That is to say, Europe and its respective states, as well as the EU itself, have followed in the wake of Hobbes, while the United States followed primarily in the path of Locke. One could spend hours explaining how both political thinkers affected both continents. This is a generalization of course, but it wouldn't hurt to explore the idea.

Some context: the historical outworking of ideas does not take place in a vacuum. The idea of a social contract began to emerge around the beginning of the 1600s and finally had its breakthrough mainly through Hobbes’ work Leviathan (1651). The author wrote it during a period of political unrest in England while he was in exile in France. The hypothetical state of nature was no more than a primitive state of anarchy of everyone against everyone, a view that could grapple with and explain for Hobbes the zeitgeist in which he lived. It is an easy connection between the civil strife of England and Hobbes’ “state of nature”, both of which he wished to distance himself from.

Because statecraft had as its goal order and the maintaining of order (and perhaps closer to home for Hobbes, the prevention of civil strife), he gave no room to revolt against authority. There could be no unjust law according to Hobbes because law itself was the codification of right and wrong. The sovereign hands down laws; the people obey them; order is maintained, and that is justice.

On the other side of the idea-ink war stood John Locke. He intentionally got mixed up in a revolution to give support and legitimacy to a certain king’s ascendency to the throne during the “Glorious Revolution” of 1688. His version of the state of nature wasn’t as dark as Hobbes’ everyone against everyone. It was a state of difficulty and discomfiture (because rights were so often disregarded) which created the social contract, statecraft to prevent the violation of rights inherent in the human state of nature. Even if he does diverge in some regards from Hobbes in that the state of nature isn’t a state of anarchy or civil war, war would inevitably appear quickly after this hypothetical moment of nature. To avoid this war, the social contract arises. Unlike Hobbes, he attempted to justify certain uprisings and rebellions as necessary. There is here the obvious connection to the American Revolutionary War to free itself from the king.

With these generalities in mind, the two minds can easily be differentiated when viewed from the standpoint of ethics. There are two great ethical spheres, generally speaking. One school of thought states that there is a right and a wrong, and that what is right or wrong is independent of the whimsical viewpoints of human beings. Like mathematical formula, this school states that right and wrong, being existences outside ourselves, are the discoverable ratios of relationships. This school (called naturalism) had its origins in Plato and Aristotle, as a reaction against the sophists of their day. The other school, positivism (not to be confused with positive, but is related to posit), states that there is no truth, no ethical laws outside ourselves. It is the group that determines right and wrong. In such a case, power, might makes right, is the inevitable conclusion.

According to Aristotle, human beings are “political animals”, meaning that it is in their nature to live among one another, and in some organized way. For Hobbes, the state of nature was previous to the society or the state. Hobbes rejected the Aristotelian view with the notion of the state as a construct. It was a construction to prevent the war of everyone against everyone. Right and wrong were created to maintain and legitimize an established order. Without these relativistic right and wrong construction, chaos would ensue. Locke on the other hand was a naturalist. Life and property were natural rights. The American Revolution would eventually lead to, and be justified in, a political thought of "inalienable rights" that were "self evident", rights that were Platonic ideals, independent from human thought or action.

But how does all this relate to the United States and the European Union? Historically, Europe was continuously dominated and oppressed by a strong and totalitarian church. This had two effects. After the reformation, and especially after the enlightenment, Europe moved increasingly towards secularism, while those persecuted by both the dominant church and eventually secular society, left for the shores of America. This set the direction for the U.S. as well. While the U.S. also moved towards a secularization of society, religious convictions were heavily solidified.

It makes sense then that, being steeped in a Christian religious tradition that was extremely Hellenized, that the United States would follow in the path of Locke. Christian religion held onto something TRUE, in and of itself, something that existed outside our own opinion or view of it. Inalienable rights then were the codification of these platonic and unchanging moral injunctions or self-evident truisms.

Europe on the other hand rejected religion, drifted towards an exclusively secular society. Religion does persist here, but on the whole the society does not claim religiosity. Recall that many left Europe for America because of religious persecution, not alone for failed revolutions. This affected Europe as well as the US. In rejecting the totality of the church, it rejected also the idea the are ethical principles outside, over and above our thoughts about these things. While the populace of the United States can generally be characterized as naturalistic, Europe is definitely relativistic, or positivist. It was only natural then to follow in the path of Hobbes, who stated that, in the state of nature, with everyone against everyone, right was determined by might. Laws were set up by states to ensure what the right was, and revolt (according to Hobbes) was intolerable.

Now before I lose you in these generalizations, let's look at the US Constitution and the EU Constitution. The US Constitution is written in the voice of the people. That is to say, "We the people" are defining what the role of government is and is not. Government is formed within the framework of limitations, is limited in what it can or cannot do. This is based on the Lockean principle that there are principles that are true, that there are rights that exist despite human behavior. Government is prevented from imposing itself upon these natural and inalienable rights.

The EU Constitution on the other is written in the voice of the state, laying down a law that is relative and positivist:

EU Constitution Article II-70 1. states: "Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion."

Article II-70 2. states: "The right to conscientious objection is recognised" (italics mine).

Compare this with the United States Constitution, Amendments, Article I: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or of the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."

While both Constitutions produced a similar effect, that of law and order, the first is society recognizing rights, granting them to the people, because society, or the state, thinks them good and efficient. The second claims these as inherent in the people and, government being necessary, limits it to having no power over these things.

I don't want to stop here, because I think there is in the outworking a very big difference between these two viewpoints. They are ethical viewpoints, viewpoints of political philosophy. Living in Europe, and in Sweden specifically, I can't help but notice that I've had more social capital with Swedes when it happens that the President was also a democrat. Europeans LOVE American democrats. When Bush was in power, well, that was when I added the phrase about being American, that "it wasn't my fault". It was a buffer to prevent a loss of capital. Guilt by association. I was from a nation dominated by a Republican! You must be evil! I was pretty popular about the time of Obama's election. Wow, what a nation you are from! No joke!

I think this is connected. I think Europe has this paternal view of government that the US doesn't because it really does view government as the determiner of what is not only right and wrong, but what is TRUE and what is FALSE. In rejecting religion (again a generalization), Europe adopted, and heavily, a moral relativism. Multiculturalism under the secular rule of law is the name of the game in Europe. And it is the rejection of Christianity, as an entity of charity and responsibility to the people, that demanded that SOMETHING take over that role. The state is to the people of Europe what the welfare of churches are in the US.

And this is why the populace of Europe is often much more socialistic than the US in its views of the role of government. It is why, in Europe, democrats are more readily accepted US Presidents (because they want to regulate via the government a fairness that Republicans general think is the role of religion).

Now I don't want to take sides here on which is best, what is wiser, etc. I am not so nationalistic to do so. Time and evolution will determine that! I am a swing voter. I think both sides have valid points and have their place and their time. But I think these ideas definitely are based on two completely different ethical, and political, paradigms.

I will make a prediction. When the EU, slowly becoming a federal union, finally decides to unite federally, so the people of each state, rather than the states themselves, vote on who is going to represent them in parliament, at that point, I predict the EU will begin to swing in its paradigm closer to Locke, closer to inalienable rights inherent in the people rather than created and enforced by the state. And that may mean that the European Union might adopt some aspects of politics that look a little more like US Republicans. 


Only if Christianity makes a comeback in Europe though.