Genesis: human dignity and responsibility, creation's wellbeing, and humanisation in care

Interesting quotes from Claus Westermann's commentary on Genesis:

"'according to our image, like ourselves'.... does not mean a particular human quality; it is not an isolated assertion about human beings, but rather concerns the purpose of their creation. The Creator wants to create a being analogous to himself, to whom he can speak, who will listen and speak to him. This remains true despite all human differences; every person is created in the image of God. Humanity is given a special task.... responsibility; human dignity ... are inseparable." (pp. 10-11)

The use of the verb 'subjugate' does not mean 'exploit', but rather 'rule with responsibility for wellbeing'. (This in contrast to the human role in Babylonian and Sumerian myths of being the forced labourer of deities.) "When this is exemplified by rule over the animals (cf. Ps 8:6), then it is because the personal element in humanity is most involved here; humanity can remain most fully human through ruling animals, as we see in passages describing the shepherd (Ps. 23, John 10)." (p. 11)

"... because [creation] is good in God's sight, joy in God's creation (as it is expressed in the praise of creation in the Psalms) is set free in human beings." (p. 12)

Review of Elizabeth Johnson's Quest for the Living God

Recently I had the opportunity in Gösta Hallonsten's Kristen troslära course here at Lund University's Centre for Theology and Religious Studies to write a review of a set course book by Elizabeth Johnson of Fordham University, Quest for the Living God: mapping new frontiers in the theology of God. My brief review is available here.

Theory on super coherence

"Super coherence" is a theory that tries to formalise what people have described in common language as "virtuous circles", "vicious cycles", etc. I first published about this idea here in an article, "Cultures of life, beyond economics" (14 May 2010).

Theory on freedom sharing

Senian optimality is my playful title for an alternative to the theory taught in elementary neoclassical economics, called Pareto Optimality. I published a short description of this alternative idea here in an article, "Unsustainable undevelopment" (27 April 2010).

"Children held naked in isolation cells"

Swedish news service TT reports today that such practices are combined with forcing children in detention centres to clean up their own vomit and urine in the isolation cells that lack toilets. (Sydsvenska Dagbladet, 24 May 2010, p A7; internet version with modified headline from print edition). The original reporting appears to have been done by the Swedish Radio programme Kaliber (link to story).

Barbaric practices carried out on children in the Swedish justice system are not an isolated problem. Isolation of children in detention is used systematically as a penalty in Sweden, despite it being illegal, according to a 2009 report by Swedish Radio, "Isolation used as punishment against children" ("Isolering används som straff mot barn", 24 June 2009, see quote below).

It is not only children who are treated inhumanely. In her 2002 book Flickan och skulden (The Girl and the Guilt), journalist Katarina Wennstam describes the utterly shocking and atrocious outcomes of residual patriarchy in Swedish legal institutions, among juries, judges, prosecutors, police. Reports on Sweden by the Council of Europe's Anti-torture Committee have repeatedly described pervasive practices of barbarism in Swedish prisons/detention centres, most acutely the use of long terms of isolation, a form of torture that causes extremely serious forms of suffering and injury.

A translation of the introduction to Swedish Radio's report on isolation punishment of children in Sweden:
"There are huge failures when children are locked up in isolation cells in the state's institutions for detained children and youths. [Swedish Radio news programme] Ekot's investigation of nearly 500 cases where children from age 11 have been isolated shows that the method is used as a punishment despite it being illegal. 'A justice scandal', says the Children's Ombudsman."

Cultures of life, beyond economics

Peaceful and nonviolent cultures of life reproduce themselves. That is a hypothesis and a theme I've been looking at in a few discussions at this website.

For my studies of environment and sustainability at Lund University in Sweden, I have been struggling to find ways to prove and to describe the advantages of, and the general viability of, walking towns (no injurious transport), one form of a nonviolent culture. I think I have made some progress, as texts published here (between October 2009 and December 2009) and at Carbusters may show. There are extraordinary numbers of advantages when we organise our settlements around walking. From personal health from walking, to more efficient use of space, to social contact, public safety, carbon-free transport (cutting much of the cause of climate change), better personal economy and public economy, etc etc etc. There are extraordinary correspondences between different systems that are linked through the choice of transport.

It even led me to ponder a theory of "super coherence", an idea that key qualities of a system or culture reproduce themselves throughout that system/culture. For example, in a walking town, the nonviolent form of transport appears to lead to a lot of other nonviolences.

When I speak of "super coherence", really it is just a theoretical extension of an idea that people have been talking about for a long time: virtuous circles, where one good action, one virtue, gives rise to more virtues, or where virtues support one another in a symbiosis.

Virtuous circles are the opposite of vicious cycles, where something bad leads to something else bad, or where bads co-exist in symbiosis.

I wonder: have others already tried to understand why such cycles or circles exist? Why is there reproduction of qualities throughout a culture? Can we know that such cycles or circles do exist? Is there is a tendency toward cultural reproduction?

Now let me turn to a different question. Why did I title this post "Cultures of life, beyond economics"? Because I wished to discuss the problem of describing how wonderful a nonviolent system is, such as a walking city (the primary form of towns for many thousands of years). Economics cannot describe all these wonders, all these additional qualities of nonviolence and peace, that come from the initial choice to limit our transport to only nonviolent forms (walking). But if we think in terms of economics, we might only produce systems and cultures that conform to those words and boundaries.

We can hardly describe love properly. How could we describe the flourishing of love in a culture of life (that promotes life through peace, nonviolence, and love)?

Cultures of life via walking and cycling

I live in a university town with limited motorised road traffic (cars, buses, trucks, motorcycles, mopeds, etc.). And it is wonderful. The town is very low stress, it is nice to walk around even the busy centre, etc.  To understand the spatial relationships of this town, we can listen to one of its most famous citizens, the comedian-actor Anders Jansson of Hipp-Hipp. He did not get his driver's license until nearly 40 years of age (and fame/fortune?), because "in Lund, if you can't cycle there, it's not worth going," he explained in his 2005 Swedish Radio sommarprat.

How is it possible to "prove" that non-injuring transport is better for a settlement (town, village, etc.)? I have looked at this question for some years, beginning with the problem of health-damaging air pollution from cars, in Stockholm. In October-December 2009, I posted articles here (republished by Carbusters' blogsite) on the advantages of carfree, and even of purely walking towns, because bikes also injure, even lethally at high speeds. The key relationship I found is that as speeds get higher, and the risk of injury gets larger, more and more space is destroyed, because it cannot be used safely. So by going slowly, we don't need to go so far, because spaces contain more of what we need. For example, consider meeting your needs (for food, social interaction, etc) on foot in a medieval walking town, like Siena, where even reaching the countryside takes only minutes. Or meeting your needs in an automobile-centric town, where you travel more quickly and farther through near-empty space to each destination.

The needs for very large settlements, e.g. cities, megacities, are not proven, in my view. The usual purposes of very large settlement size are, from my understanding of history, connected to the concentration/monopolisation of power/resources, e.g. the dominant market city, the dominant imperial city. But if proven on acceptable peaceful/nonviolent grounds, the needs for larger settlements could be met by networks of walking towns connected by safe methods of transport.

Smaller university-centric towns may indeed be a key to transition cultures toward real sustainability, for example the sustainability of our environment. Firstly, there are many humanity-promoting values of learning/knowledge/cultures/communicative action that are potentially the primary action of the university; democracy is one such value, another is the low-consumerism inherent when people spend their time learning, creating culture, etc. Secondly, in a smaller university town one can walk and cycle, thus cutting a lot of problems like climate change emissions, and adding a lot of benefits (the cultures of life that come from interaction, a point I am trying to explore here). Thirdly, a walking/cycling town can keep the surrounding/embracing ecosystems intact, creating settlements within them. This solves many serious problems (e.g '20 problems solved' by eating local and organic).

The learning centres of such towns can be "grandmothers universities" on the Vandana Shiva model, or community colleges of the Nordic model, not only the standard/homogenised(/-ing) type. The study circle is a popular form for culture/learning in Sweden, and it is essentially free, democratic and equal.

Giving priority to learning centres and cultural centres can be very important. Such centres can be compared to trees, seeds, and the charka, the cotton-cloth spinning wheel that Gandhi made central to his movement for dignity and independence. Let's consider each in turn. Trees can bring a large number of varied benefits, as Wangari Maathai and the Green Belt Movement have shown. The seed like the charka that most people can use to spin cloth, is a simple thing and is a way to promote peace and life against the oppression of corporate biotechnology, as Vandana Shiva has pointed out and  made real in her seed-saving farmers' movement, Navdanya. Similarly, the oppressiveness of mass media and homogenisation of knowledge/culture/life can be side-stepped with the organisation of culture of diversity and learning. Again, it is itself a culture of life, to interact and share.

If you will bear with me in trying to understand these issues at an abstract level: the cultures of life may often or always require peaceful/nonviolent interaction. There are several interactions we've looked at in this article already: the interactions of people with each other according to the kind of transport used, the interactions of settlement with ecosystem, the interactions of creating cultures and learning.

Some of the ideas explored are: first, by removing injurious transport forms from a settlement, we obtain more space for such peaceful/nonviolent interaction. Second, we have discussed how one very positive form of peaceful/nonviolent interaction is the interactivity of culture centres and learning centres.

These are two very different patterns. One is highly destructive, the other is highly creative. The destructiveness of motorised transport spaces involves millions killed and injured every year, climate destruction, etc. The creativity of culture/learning centres involves many dimensions also, from self-expression, to community creation, needs meeting, etc.