The eternal clashes between state and community about the best environment for the spiritual growth of members of a group: lessons from the Tai Ji Men case.
by Davide S. Amore *
*A paper presented at the international webinar “A Safe Environment for Tai Ji Men,” co-organized by CESNUR and Human Rights Without Frontiers on June 5, 2023, World Environment Day.
First, let us start by defining what we mean by environment. We can understand the environment in a strict sense, i.e., what Mother Earth offers to us, or in a broad sense, i.e., the search for the best environment in which a human being can be able to grow both morally and spiritually. Thus, nowadays two tendencies coexist and sometimes intersect: the struggle to protect the natural environment, which leads to movements such as “Friday for Future,” and the search for the ideal environment in which to isolate oneself or take a break from the frenetic modern life. Both tendencies, however, have in common the fact that they are at least viewed with diffidence by those who prioritize a state organization of community life.
When I went to school and I was not fully aware of myself, of the world, and of the choices to be made in it—exactly as it happens to my children now—the unitary and dominant vision promoted and propagated by school and university institutions was, and continues to be, that civilization, after having laid solid foundations in Greco-Roman antiquity, reinvigorated in the modern era following the dark Medieval period clinging to an inhibitory religious conception, found its existential apogee in our era. The fulcrum of this vision was the uncritical acceptance of the state, as we understand it today, as a regulatory element of the socio-political and economic life of human beings. The state was not a topic for discussion. It was, simply. It simply is, and must be, or so at least it has been inculcated to us.
Yet, the State with a capital “S” is, within the historical course of humanity, only a rather late chapter, and hopefully only a parenthesis. A vast number of humans in many times and places have lived better lives than us, reaching heights of civilization unknown to the schizoid modern humans, without knowing what the State with a big “S” was, or without even having the theoretical elements to conceive it.
One could say, schematizing things, that when the rulers, rather than opposing the private bankers who amassed a fortune by earning money (a truly parasitic activity in which none of the Prophets, peace be upon them all, indulged, to the point of expelling the merchants from the temple or declaring the tax collector to be a miserable figure), absorbed and engulfed the banking system, the modern state was born, guarantor not only of a quiet civil life, but credit-maker, employer, workaholic legislator, and regulator of every detail of human relationships that were previously—rightly—left to the self-determination of its subjects.
In and around the Enlightenment, the legitimacy of the state was rooted in philosophical thought (and from there, eventually, in the textbooks we mentioned at the beginning) by theorists such as Rousseau and Hume: the “noble savage” yielded his supposed Arcadian happiness to the State—although nobody asked him whether he liked it or not—through a social pact that would have protected him from the expansionist ambitions of his neighbor.
In my recent visit to Taiwan, what struck me the most about this whole Tai Ji Men case was the story of the Swiss Villa. That is, on the one hand, the efforts moved by love for his own dizi that led Dr. Hong to invest all of himself in creating a haven of peace where to cultivate one’s intellect and spirituality. On the other hand, government efforts to hinder this achievement by making all sorts of excuses which, in fact, denied the Tai Ji Men community the right to organize itself and in the end determined the end of the dream of the Swiss Villa, which is now totally ruined.
This reminded me of what the Prophet of Islam had to undergo in order to be able to self-affirm the new-born Muslim community, to the point of reaching the consequence that the only possible way to achieve this was to build the ideal environment suitable for this purpose.
In both cases, we have a state authority that hinders the project of a community to carve out an ideal space in which to grow. And this is because it is easier for the state to manage its own citizens when everyone conforms to the same laws or so called social pact, preferably through the payment of arbitrarily imposed taxes.
In Islam, we do not have the presumption of elevating everything said about the state organization to a paradigm of human realization, because indeed, coherently with the Word of God Almighty (Qur’an 5, 3), we assert:
﴿ٱلْيَوْمَ أَكْمَلْتُ لَكُمْ دِينَكُمْ وَأَتْمَمْتُ عَلَيْكُمْ نِعْمَتِى وَرَضِيتُ لَكُمُ ٱلْإِسْلَـٰمَ دِينًۭا ۚ﴾
[Today I have perfected your deen for you and completed My blessing upon you and I am pleased with Islam as a deen for you.]
Where “dīn” would stands for “life-transaction” rather than for “religion,” a term used by the Shaykh Abdalqadir As-Sufi, born Ian Dallas, to render the complex meaning of this term, as “dīn” and closely related to “dayn,” i.e., “debit/credit” in Arabic.
Thus, humanity has reached its peak in what is past with respect to us (salafa-yaslufu). A past in which man was in balance with the surrounding environment, where resources were given time to regenerate before being exploited again, where the right time was given for the growth of the body and that of the spirit, and where the ascetic life it was the right counterbalance to the worldly one in a balance that today is just a mere memory and that communities like Tai Ji Men tend to restore.
And in the perfect form to which Islam, and therefore the human beings who concretely embodied it, gave birth in the first three generations, and then reproduced for a long time in a way almost corresponding to the original model, The Luminous City of the Prophet (al-Madīnatu’l-Munawwarah), before the reformist drift that transformed the once Muslim countries in the opaque and second-hand mirror of the hegemonic West, the state was an unacknowledged reality.
So much so that the very term “state” is completely absent (as indeed is “bank”) from the lexicon of Arabic, the Qur’anic language and lingua franca of Islam. “Dawlah,” a term that is used today, and abused by treacherous realities such as ISIS, and which among other things was not part of either the Qur’anic or the prophetic phraseology, has a different meaning, indicated by its linguistic root, of “circulation,” “rotation”—masterfully represented in the dance of the Mevlani dervishes. Hence a movement of community wealth, typical of that human-environment balance mentioned above, therefore opposed to the stasis and stagnation of the ineradicable modern state.
The two events we have mentioned, namely the foundation of the city of Medina and the realization of the Swiss Villa, moved by common causes and, even considering the different scale, with a surprisingly similar development, had and will have, God willing, different outcomes. Since, while the first was resolved with the separation from the central authority and, through the trauma of the war, with the self-determination of the new reality, the second will find—and this is what we hope and we stand for—justice when the whole Tai Ji Men case will be solved through an agreement between the parties – the state and the community – in which wrongs can be righted and harmony triumphs.
And it is precisely in this that the lesson of the Tai Ji Men case consists. It teaches us not to let our guard down in the face of abuses by the authorities by advocating a false “rule of law” that could be overthrown at any moment, and not to take for granted what seems to us to be acquired by birth. And that the only way to achieve peace, justice and love is for humans to return to live both in harmony with the surrounding environment and with conscience.
Source: Bitter Winter