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Showing posts with label open. Show all posts
Showing posts with label open. Show all posts

Monday, November 4, 2013

WWII as a dispute about dining : closed - or open - commensality ?

Between 1931 and 1941, Japan, Germany, Italy and Russia gobbled up a dozen or so small nations while the people in the "universality of human rights" espousing parts of the world (hello America !) sat silently on their hands , bystanders at a schoolyard bullying session.

They said, basically, that Manchuria, Albania, Ethiopia , Czechoslovakia , Poland, Denmark, Belgium et al were not members of their national family and hence not invitees at their dining table.

So the troubles of the Poles and Danes (or American blacks and other national minorities) were of no concern to them.

They espoused exactly the same  "closed"  attitude to the matter of who dines at the common table as did Hitler ,the dark-haired Aryan wannabe , regarding the German citizens who were Jews and Romas.

Jesus practised an open commensality - inviting all humanity to be part of his family and invited all to dine around his common table.

The 'princes of HIS churches' circa 1931 to 1945, by and large did not practise Jesus's open commensality.

They preferred greatly to save their own church buildings and pensions rather than try and save other human lives.

 Or their own souls : for martyrs the cause, these men  definitely were not.

A few others did more, gave their lives to save Jews and others and the moral import of their stories are being told well.

But Henry Dawson also gave up his live to aid all humanity ( advocating "open" commensality for all humanity needing life-saving penicillin) .

His story, along with that of others like Robert Pulvertaft and Jimmy Duhig, has never been told fully and completely in all its moral implications.

"all Life is family : Agape's Manhattan Project" tries to address this omission....

Commensality : closed , open --- and global

Hitler regarded German Aryans as family -  so they all got invited to eat at his table - but German Jews and German Romas did not - they might have once been Germans citizens but were not 'family'.

So, they got no meal invite but rather a whiff of  lethal gas instead.

Hitler practised what is technically called "closed" commensality : only inviting a select few to dine around the common table.

Jesus (and Martin Henry Dawson with penicillin) practised "open" commensality : all humanity was invited to the family dining table .

Practising closed or open commensality are voluntary decisions : acts of free volition.

But today, many people like myself don't believe one can "practise" global commensality --- we simply regard it as an established, inevitable -scientific - fact of life.

 All Life, small and big, willy-nilly, dines around the only dinner table that Life in the universe appears to have : lifeboat Earth.

Taking in each other's laundry in endless cycles of energy and matter use and re-use.

Dawson seemed to be working towards such a global view of commensality but died very young before his 49th birthday.

However, interestingly, his personal research interest over his short lifetime was in the robust commensality (shared on both sides) of microbes and humanity....