Aaron Perry
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Jonathan Granoff is President of the Global Security Institute, Representative to the United Nations for the Permanent Secretariat of the World Summit of Nobel Peace Laureates, and Ambassador for Peace, Security and Nuclear Disarmament of The Parliament of the World’s Religions. He serves on numerous advisory and governing boards, including the International Law Section of the American Bar Association, Bawa Muhaiyaddeen Fellowship, Universal Sufi Council, World Wisdom Council, Tikkun, International Association of Sufism, Middle Powers Initiative, the Jane Goodall Institute, and the Parliamentarians for Nuclear Nonproliferation and Disarmament. A Fellow of the World Academy of Arts and Science, Jonathan was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2014. He is also the award-winning screenwriter of “The Constitution: The Document that Created a Nation,” and has articles in over 50 books and publications, including: “The Sovereignty Revolution,” “Toward a Nuclear Weapons Free World,” “Imagining Tomorrow,” “Reverence for Life Revisited,” “Hold Hope, Wage Peace,” as well as “The Forgotten Why.”
In this conversation, recorded on the International Day of Non Violence (Oct 2, 2019), celebrating the example and legacy of Mahatma Gandhi, Mr. Granoff implores and encourages us to each cultivate the consciousness and culture signified by “hearts without borders.” With a profound focus on compassion, on love, on the golden rule, and on embracing and celebrating our unifying humanity, Jonathan is a global spokesperson for not only what is possible in these times, but what is essential, what is necessary, what is self-evident: “We have to recognize our shared destiny on planet Earth!” With a scholarly command of the formation of the modern nation state – the geopolitical construct that superseded European feudalism, and that is our reality today – Jonathan asks us these simple questions: What are you doing to (1) Eliminate poverty; (2) Heal our climate and natural world; (3) Eliminate Nuclear Weapons; and (4) What are your deepest values, and how are you putting those in action?
A scholar of world’s religions, Jonathan shares that at the heart of the Koran is a compassionate and merciful God, that the Hindu Gandhi implored us to think of the most disenfranchised people we know whenever considering policy, that Buddhism expresses a deep compassion for suffering, and that in the Gospel of Matthew is Jesus’ message: “What you do for the least among us…” Jonathan also recalls how Muhammad refused Kingship, much in the same way George Washington did upon winning the American Revolutionary War, and how we must elevate service over power, compassion over arrogance, and love over greed.
This is about changing our minds, changing our hearts, and changing our culture… Together.
The Global Security Institute www.gsinstitute.org
The Nobel Peace Laureate Summits: www.nobelpeacesummit.com
International Law Section of the American Bar Association: www.americanbar.org/groups/international_law/
Jane Goodall Institute: www.janegoodall.org
Parliament of World’s Religions: www.americanbar.org/groups/international_law/
Bawa Muhaiyaddeen Fellowship: www.bmf.org
Move the Nuclear Weapons Money: www.nuclearweaponsmoney.org/
United Religions Initiative Nuclear Prayer: uri.org/who-we-are/cooperation-circle/voices-world-free-nuclear-weapons
The Peace Pledge Project to Live Loving Kindness and Compassion: peacepledgeproject.org/
Transcript
(Automatically generated transcript for search engine optimization and reference purposes – grammatical and spelling errors may exist.)
Welcome to the YonEarth community’s Stewardship and Sustainability Podcast series.
Today we have the opportunity to visit with Jonathan Granoff.
Hi Jonathan.
Hi.
Thank you.
Great to be with you today.
It’s beautiful here today.
Beautiful day.
Yeah.
Jonathan Granoff is an international lawyer, advocate, scholar, and award-winning
screenwriter who serves as president of the Global Security Institute, representative
to the United Nations for the permanent secretary of the world’s summit of Nobel Peace
laureates, and ambassador for peace, security, and nuclear disarmament of the Parliament
of the world’s religions.
He serves on numerous advisory and governing boards, including the International Law
Section of the American Bar Association, Bawa Mukhayadine Fellowship, Universal Sufi Council,
World Wisdom Council, Tikkun, International Association of Sufism, Middle Powers Initiative,
and the parliamentarians for nuclear, non-proliferation and disarmament, working to bring the values
of love, compassion, and justice into action.
He is a fellow in the World Academy of Arts and Science, and was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize
in 2014.
Mr. Granoff is the award-winning screenwriter of the Constitution, the document that created a nation,
and has articles in more than 50 publications and books, including the sovereignty revolution
toward a nuclear weapons-free world, imagining tomorrow, analyzing moral issues, perspectives
on 9-11, toward a world in balance, reverence for life revisited, and hold hope, wage peace.
He has been a featured guest and expert commentator on hundreds of radio and television programs,
and testified as an expert in the United States Congress, parliaments of the United Kingdom
and Canada, and at the United Nations numerous times.
Jonathan, it’s a real pleasure and honor to have this opportunity to visit with you
and appreciate you taking the time to share with us.
Thank you.
So we have a lot to talk about today, and today, in fact, is October 2nd, 2019,
the International Day of Nonviolence.
Tell us about that. Let’s kick off the…
Well, the United Nations recognizes today as an International Day of Nonviolence
with a focus on Mahatma Gandhi’s message of social change through nonviolence.
And actually, there’s a great web TV, the UN TV, of October 2nd, 2015,
where I was able to participate in one of these with a cellist, Michael Fitzpatrick,
and they gave us 15 minutes at the end of the session, which began with the Secretary General,
where Michael played this beautiful, resonant cello resonating the heart,
and I read quotes from Mahatma Gandhi, and then spoke from my heart.
And so we tried to combine the heart and the head, the policies that Gandhi promoted
of nonviolent social change, and the artistic intervention of a genius artist, Michael Fitzpatrick.
And I’d recommend that, and at the end of the show, we’ll put some recommended links,
and we’ll put the links to that stream that the UN does.
Mahatma Gandhi’s main social policy message remains pertinent today.
He said, imagine the face of the most disenfranchised person that you know,
the outcast, the poor, and then if there’s a policy,
think, will this policy burden that person or benefit them?
It’s really resonant with what Jesus said in Matthew, where, you know, he says,
I was hungry, did you feed me? I was naked, did you clothe me?
I was in prison, did you visit me? I was sick, did you visit me?
And then the disciples say, well, master, we never saw you naked or in prison or sick or anything.
And then he says, what you do to the least amongst us, you do to me.
And as a focus of policy and intention in our lives,
it’s a really, really accurate metric.
If you think through policies that work and don’t work in life, between nations,
or even in your own personal life, having compassion as a metric,
compassion for those who suffer and serving to eliminate that,
not only works politically and socially and economically,
and for peace-building, but in the most amazing way,
enobles our own spiritual growth. You know, you would, you know,
like the Buddhist first truth is, the world is suffering, right?
Just to recognize that, there’s old age sickness death, we all suffer,
we all lose people that we love, we all have disappointment, betrayal,
things don’t work out, the world is not heaven,
but he gives a path to becoming free from that.
And one of the core elements is cultivation of the quality of compassion
and non-attachment, of course, and wisdom.
But you see in the Quran, begins each verse of the Quran,
begins in the name of God, compassionate, merciful,
this focus on compassion as a way of becoming joyous in one’s own life
by feeling the suffering of others, how illogical and paradoxical it is
that fulfillment comes from the willingness to feel others.
One’s own personal, you know?
So I think there’s a lot of people that are like trying to expand consciousness.
And my belief is it would be better if we expanded conscience.
Yes, expand conscience.
So yeah, so another cool UN day is April 5th,
is because of the work of Bahrain, is going to be international day of conscience.
And next year will be the first one, and we’ll see where that goes.
But you know, conscience is a human capacity of tremendous power,
but it only arises in a meaningful social way based on what you look at.
Gandhi says, look at the face of the poorest, look at the face of those who are suffering
and have compassion there and then act from that point.
So today is the day of honoring that message.
I love it. Well, and I love in this term conscience,
the etymology would suggest that with science knowledge and con with.
It’s knowledge with another.
With knowing.
With knowing.
And of course, Jesus’ admonition and Gandhi’s admonition,
and Hamid’s admonition is not just knowing anything,
but know what people go through, know what other human beings,
or what the suffering of poverty, the suffering of environmental degradation in justice.
We should look at that and know about that and care about that.
You know, people wonder why they have trouble being at peace with themselves.
Well, the formula is not real difficult, you know. Apply the golden rule.
Let’s do a thought experiment.
Great.
Imagine tomorrow you treat everyone without reference to the golden rule.
You treat everyone just as a means to your most selfish end.
You don’t care about their well-being.
You love things and use people.
You give vent to your anger and most despicable qualities.
And you don’t care about their well-being or dignity.
And then just think of how you would feel when you got in bed that night.
That doesn’t sound very fun at all.
Right. You’d probably be alone.
You’d probably be alone.
Then a thought experiment.
Think the next day you treat everyone with the dignity that you’re capable of,
and the love you’re capable of, and the dignity and love you want for yourself,
and you treat everybody you meet as part of your family.
And you know, you just do your best for yourself and others
as you treat others as you would want to be treated.
You apply the golden rule.
And then think of how you would feel at the end of the day,
the peace, the joy, the fulfillment.
Now, when you think of how nations behave,
because April 5th will be a UN day,
and nations don’t have conscience,
but there’s ethical principles that arise from conscience.
And the ethical principle that arises from conscience
is the universality of the golden rule.
You treat others as one wants to be treated.
When nations treat other nations as they want to be treated,
friendship, trading partners, and success is the result.
When they don’t chaos, instability arise.
So after World War I,
the victors imposed tremendous burdens on the German people,
and we reap the whirlwind of Nazism.
After World War II, the United States led
with the application of wisdom with the martial plan,
the consequence being building up the bank with Germany and Japan,
and having trading partners.
The sustainable development goals of the United Nations system,
in a sense, are a global application of those principles,
a global martial plan, if you will.
The welfare system in the United States,
or public education,
and all of the things of the state that we’re forgetting
in the United States, all the things that the state does for us,
that it expresses our values through the state,
benefit everyone, the common good,
and this principle of pursuing the common good,
pursuing the expression of values,
of our highest values through the state,
has to be based on the golden rule,
and that has to include everyone.
There can be no one outside of
that all men are created equal.
It has to include, which it didn’t,
when Jefferson put it out there,
it didn’t include, called people of color,
it didn’t include women,
it didn’t include people without property.
We know that behind it is the principle
that all lives are precious and equal,
and all nations need to be precious.
We now know we cannot have a secure nation
in an insecure world.
The idea of running our nation,
the United States, or any state,
like a garrison city state,
a medieval times with walls around it,
is preposterous.
The climate doesn’t have walls.
Pandemic diseases don’t have walls.
Capital doesn’t even have walls.
It flows through the global economy seamlessly.
The air we breathe doesn’t have walls.
We are one human family.
We live in one very fragile,
miraculous stratosphere-covered bio-system,
in which everything is put together
by this majestic hand of grace
to allow us to blossom as human beings.
And when we honor that,
and honor the ethical principles
that the wise have given us,
and put it into policy,
society flourishes,
and our personal lives flourish.
What’s really cool is that the same principles
that make us happy as people
can make nations flourish.
Yeah, absolutely beautiful.
There may be a moral fabric
to the human endeavor.
In other words,
there isn’t a moral fabric
for other living species.
They don’t have the obligation
of choosing right and wrong.
But we do.
And we have the capacity
of choosing right and wrong.
That capacity is called conscience.
So this long exposition
that I’ve just gotten into
and I apologize for this.
This is beautiful, it’s poetic.
I apologize for it.
I think we should think about expanding conscience
rather than expanding consciousness
because as the heart expands,
so does consciousness.
And expanding conscience is expanding the heart.
Ultimately, our heart should be
in accord with the natural…
A resonant heart,
a heart that’s in tune
with the cosmos,
consideration,
a considerate person,
kind of sidearial,
in harmony with the cosmos,
would be reflective
of the natural world’s reality,
which is borderless.
So today,
international day of nonviolence,
we’re talking about
international day of conscience.
We should be pursuing hearts
without borders.
Uh-huh, beautiful hearts without borders.
How hearts without borders?
That’s a good, good motto.
So you had in just the past
few weeks without borders?
Oh yes, let’s, let’s pursue it.
Let’s title the show.
Hearts without borders.
Discussion, a discussion of…
We can do that.
Yeah, that’s, I mean, I think it’s a wonderful reflection.
We can, we can title our discussion hearts without borders.
And then you can title your
series that you’ll be launching the same thing.
You know,
the past few weeks,
you’ve been in a number
of really remarkable meetings and gatherings.
I was really looking forward to you sharing
with our audience
what were these gatherings?
Who were you with?
What was being discussed?
Okay, so
every year,
the Nobel Peace Prize winners have a summit.
Last year,
we met in Bogota, Colombia,
to support the process
of ending the Civil War there.
So we had about 25 Nobel Peace laureates coming.
And this year, we met in
Yucatan,
and we had about 30 Nobel Peace laureates.
Yucatan in Mexico.
In Mexico, right.
So that some of the Nobel Peace laureates
that came were Frederick Duclerc,
who won the Nobel Prize with Nelson Mandela
for ending the part-die.
Sure in a body.
The human rights lawyer from Iran.
A topical Carmen,
the courageous journalist from Yemen.
President Santos from Colombia,
who helped
in the Civil War there.
Kailash,
you won the Nobel Prize with Malala
from India,
who’s addressed child slavery.
The lawyers from Tunisia,
who helped with the Arab Spring
and the transformation to a really functioning democracy.
And we don’t hear much about,
because it’s a success story.
In North Africa,
Leima Gabawi,
who ended the Civil War in West Africa.
Nobel at Jodi Williams,
who was so instrumental
in addressing landmines
and the distortions of militarization
and a strong advocate of gender equity.
A balance between male and female
and policy.
And others of a similar
inspiring nation,
and Nobel Peace laureate organizations,
like Pugwash,
which brought scientists together
during the Cold War from the Soviet Union
on most of the public
doesn’t know about these organizations
that won the Nobel Prize.
I’ll just come back to that one
in a minute.
International Peace Bureau,
that’s hundreds of peace organizations.
Amnesty International,
the International Red Cross,
Human Rights Watch.
And these are people
and organizations that have
applied the highest human values.
To critical issues of peace,
and won the Nobel Peace Prize
for their efforts.
Many of them,
many of them were challenged.
Their lives were challenged.
They risked their lives
to do these things.
And they were successful.
That’s another interesting thing,
is these are people with tremendous moral insight
who were successful in their endeavors.
So we met for three days there.
And then produced a
statement addressing most of the
major critical issues of our time.
Michele Gorbachev,
his contribution,
was that we must immediately
affirm what he and Ronald Reagan
affirmed in Geneva in 1985.
A nuclear war can never be won
and therefore,
must never ever be fought.
And immediately the commencement
of negotiations amongst
the nuclear weapons
states to fulfill their legal
obligation to negotiate
the elimination of nuclear weapons,
stop their spread, stop their modernization.
This year’s
Nobel Peace Laureate Recipients
was the International Campaign
to abolish nuclear weapons,
which worked to create a treaty
prohibiting nuclear weapons.
And their message is that
the weapons are
illegal, immoral, and
very uselessness.
You can’t use them.
We now know the international
positions for the prevention
of nuclear war were there.
They won the Nobel Prize in 1985.
And their spokesperson,
Ira Halffand, highlighted that
if a mere 100 of them were to go off
say in exchange in South Asia between
India and Pakistan,
it would throw at least 5 million
tons of sudden to the stratosphere
and end agriculture as we know it on the planet.
We now know that if one country
used them first,
we would have self-assured destruction.
It’s kind of like
a group of, we
used to have a bipolar world
of the U.S. Now we have
nine countries with the weapons
and it says if we have these
characters sitting in the basement
of our house,
knee deep in gasoline
holding matches
and saying,
we don’t get what we want.
If we feel too threatened,
if our state feels too threatened,
we’re going to like the match
and then everything’s over.
So I’m the president of the Global
Security Institute that was started
by the vision of Senator
Alan Cranston in California
who met Albert Einstein
and was convinced
from the late 1940s how
important this issue is.
And he had a couple of points.
One point that he made was if we get every other issue right and don’t
get this one right, it won’t matter.
Number two, nuclear weapons
are unworthy of civilization.
And number three,
the need for global cooperation
and the pursuit of security
is not an option anymore.
It’s an imperative.
And it’s not a diminution of our sovereignty
to cooperate with the rest of the world.
It’s an expression of our values,
which sovereignty is a concept as an application
of the state is something we created.
We need to infuse
with sufficient power
the international organizations
necessary to
get us to a nuclear weapons
pre-world.
I’m pleased to say that from the time of Ronald Reagan’s
advocacy of this
with Gorbachev.
We’ve gone from over 60,000 to less than 15,000.
So we know how to get rid of them.
We know how to stop their growth.
We know how to stop their modernization
with stopping further testing.
Bring the test band treaty into force.
Don’t produce any more
nuclear-capable fizzle material
strengthened the safeguards regime.
We know where they are.
We know how to do it.
The problem is the political will
and the arrogant pursuit of power.
Aragon pursuit of power.
Aragon toward the natural world.
Aragon amongst ourselves
is endemic in the human condition.
Endemic in the human condition.
And the wisdom
of the founding fathers of the United States
to create checks and balances
on the pursuit of power
is something that’s so important
at this moment.
At this moment in America.
In which America which is such
as such a global impact
as we behave,
others will so behave.
And the idea of autocratic
arrogant application of power
by a handful of people
or by one person is simply
unacceptable, irrational
and extremely hazardous and dangerous
in today’s world.
And domestically in the United States
today, as we speak,
we’re facing a crisis in this.
A serious crisis
that I don’t think the mainstream media
or the social media
has fully grasped
how pivotal this moment is
for the world.
And thus far,
perhaps hopefully
the only big test
to our Constitution
and the balance of power
that was established by the framers.
We haven’t had a test
like this since the Civil War,
in my opinion.
And the Civil War was
let’s talk about America a little bit.
The Civil War was essentially
a battle between the assertion
of maximum property rights,
the claim that property
is paramount to human rights.
And then the minimum human right
to be a citizen,
which doesn’t get resolved in law
until the 1960 civil rights statutes.
The states that lost
these red states that lost
they essentially
argued for years
that the Civil War was not
about owning human beings.
It was an issue of states rights.
That’s it. That’s it.
That’s just the smoke screen.
What they were really saying is
it states rights in order to own people.
This is a horrible proposition.
And that was resolved
in a war, which
you know, huge bloodshed.
Today, we have
something even more fundamentally at stake.
Not only the American system of checks and balances,
the three co-equal branches of government,
the legislative branch, which makes the laws
that are to be executed by the executive branch,
which doesn’t make or interpret law.
It executes
what the congress tells it to do.
And thus, the executive branch
in our system is accountable to the Congress.
This executive
is saying we’re
not accountable to the Congress.
We’re not accountable to anyone.
We’re not accountable to anyone.
We’re not accountable to the international community.
We’re not accountable to God.
We’re not accountable to the Congress.
popularity, or tweets, it’s degrading, it’s immoral, and it’s illegal.
And the other portion of our government is the judiciary, which has the sole and exclusive
duty of interpreting the law.
And now we have the executive branch padding the judiciary, coming from a very small, extremely
right-wing, fanatic group, the Federalist Society, padding judges.
We have an American Bar Association with 450,000 lawyers, and this administration essentially
ignores the wisdom of the enormous resource of the American Bar Association in its decision-making
and goes to a very small, ideologically driven group.
So the balance of our nation is at risk.
And deeper than that, deeper than that, in my opinion, is after World War II, the United
States became the beacon of principle and hope for the world.
Now people don’t realize the value of vision if they look at a short-term, measurable,
management by objective perspective in terms of policy.
When Thomas Jefferson put forward, we hold these truths to be self-evident that all
men are created equal.
So that’s, obviously, hardly self-evident.
Your tall, handsome, young, I’m young, overweight, and I’m not very young, young at heart, but
I’m not young.
I was, were we equal in the eyes of the Creator and were equal as human beings, but more
importantly, this was an ought, our vision should exceed our grasp, and this vision has
been compelling to the world ever since he said it.
Things have fallen all over based on putting this vision before the people or the vision
of one man, one who rules everybody.
And it has been the underlying vision of the moral compass of the world since the end
of World War II because the United States was so triumphant in it.
And out of that has come the creation of at least 80 democracies that were colonized
people, but more importantly, a set of principles that are at risk, and let me just list some
of them.
Yes.
One is the sacred duty of those who govern to those whom they’re governing, to be honest,
accountable, and transparent.
Two, is the importance of the rule of law, not the rule through law.
In the rule through law, the state rules through the law.
In the rule of law, the state is also subject to the law.
And you don’t have different tiers of law for different classes of people.
The use of science as a framework for evaluating and discussing public policy, that there are
objective truths that are distinguishable from myths and simply making stuff up.
And the three, the importance of global cooperation through treaties to control, curtail, and eliminate
weapons of mass destruction.
As an American, the Constitution makes treaties, the supreme law of the land.
We have a president now who talks about treaties as if they were deals.
People don’t grasp how dangerous this is because it’s not only distorting our relations
with other nations, it’s undermining our Constitution, where the first nation created
by a legal instrument, the Constitution.
Another very important gift, or leadership of the United States, the importance of the
rule of law and constitutional democracy, the promotion of the fundamental values and freedoms
embodied in the universal declaration of human rights.
Which is irreducible, indivisible, and inalienable.
You can’t sell your human rights, and they don’t come from the state.
They come from the inherent dignity of being a human being.
That all human beings have these rights, including asylum seekers, including mothers from Central
America, including everybody.
These are a few of the principles that I think are at risk now that America has given up its
global role of leadership and said, we’re not going to care about the rest of the world.
We’re just about ourselves.
In this vacuum, you have five aspiring empires, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Turkey, China, and
Russia.
All of which are basically authoritarian and different guys as ideology, economics, or religion.
They don’t adhere to these fundamental principles that are so important.
So it’s not just the republic of the United States at risk.
You throw out science, you throw out values, throw out accountability.
It’s unlikely that we’ll have a global order of sufficient quality and cooperation to
protect the climate, to protect the phytoplankton which we breathe, which breeds us from the oceans,
to rainforests, the topsoil, the water table, eliminate poverty, and get rid of nuclear
weapons before they get rid of us.
The level of global cooperation and leadership that’s necessary could fall apart if we lose
the United States.
So that, to me, is what’s at risk and why everyone watching this should be demanding of
all of our political leaders answers to three questions, especially to hope journalists
are watching this.
One, what are you doing to eliminate poverty?
That’s the moral imperative of our time because the first time in human history, you have
the technological social capacity to eliminate poverty, a mere pittance of our military budget
could take care of it.
Two, what are you doing to protect the climate in the natural world?
We don’t have a choice about that.
It’s imperative because never before in human history, as human endeavor impacted the
natural world like it does now.
We haven’t had a climate this warm in 10,000 years, and number three, what are you doing
to get rid of nuclear weapons?
They need to be asked these questions.
They’re not.
They’re being asked questions that are not as pertinent.
I would urge that every journalist who watches this ask those questions.
Beautiful.
I want to ask you, Jonathan, at the gathering with the Nobel Peace Laureates, it seems there
could be a convergence between these otherwise disparate existential threats that we’re confronting.
Are you seeing signs of hope notwithstanding the incredible challenges we’re facing?
That the nuclear issue, the climate environmental issue, and the governance and sound leadership
issue?
Is there a convergence underway in the global community?
Absolutely.
Actually, the other event that I was, I shared the vision forum with the country of Bahrain
at the UN on what is our vision for the future.
We had a bunch of foreign ministers.
People are understanding the need for addressing these principles all over, but I have spoken
to youth in China, in Russia, all over the world, and there were over 3,000 young people
at this Nobel Peace Laureate summit.
You see this with the diplomats, even from the most challenged regions, realized that we
have to recognize our shared destiny on the planet Earth.
I was speaking to the gathering called Seliger, which is in Russia several years ago.
Adam, your Putin, convenes this.
Two weeks before I was there, Putin was the main speaker, and then after that, the week
before Sergio Lavrov, the foreign minister of Russia, was the speaker, and then myself.
This was the cream of the youth of Russia.
I began and I pointed out that 50 to 70 percent of our oxygen comes from phytoplankton,
single-cell organisms in the ocean, which depends on the health of the oceans, which depends
on the balance of alkaline and acid, which depends on the climate and the balance of fresh
water and saltwater in the oceans and the temperature, and that we are breathing together
this shared blessing, a blessing of enormous majesty from the Creator, and that we should
have some gratitude.
The response that I got from these young people was so positive, so hopeful.
They were so knowledgeable and so connected, and then I said, in the meantime, instead of
our nations cooperating with each other, we’re pointing nuclear weapons at each other.
Do any of you want to wipe out New York City?
Do you think that your counterparts in New York City want to wipe out Moscow?
They were cheering, but they were supporters of their country, but I had the same response
with kids in China, the same response with kids in Mexico, the same response of kids
in Philadelphia or New York.
There’s a class that has grown up with a global awareness of global consciousness.
The kids going on strike on the climate are all over the world.
The kids are right.
So anyway, in Mexico, like thousands of kids I was speaking to and I said, change the
heart, change the system, not the climate.
They went wild, love it.
When I was in Russia, I went to some of the smaller towns outside of Moscow, and I saw
kids with the tattoos on their neck talking like this, with the attitude, with attitude,
without gratitude, angry, without faith in religion or spirituality, without connection
to the natural world, without hoping their government, without connectivity to the emerging
technologies that internet and other communication systems give us, without trust in their government
and they are angry, and they look a lot like the white nationalists in America.
They look a lot like the passionate supporters of tyrants all over the world.
They are easily manipulated.
They don’t understand science.
They don’t have the capacities of critical thinking and they are being manipulated by
a small cadre of people trying to destroy modernity and lead us to a mythical existence that
never existed in the past.
So we saw it in the United States, make America great was code for make America white, and
we had Cambridge Analytica and other enterprises using Facebook which cooperated with them
in manipulating public opinion.
Well, they’ve done the same thing in England with Brexit, they’ve done the same techniques
in Brazil, all over the world, and we’re seeing this battle between a class of young people
emerging with a high level of global consciousness, hope, wisdom, wisdom in young people, and provincialism,
fear, xenophobia, racism, nationalism, going the other end, religious fanaticism, going
the other way.
So we’re in a battle for the heart, for the spirit, and for our institutions, and everyone
watching has got to step up and answer this most important question.
Have I come in contact with the love and caring that’s part of my human dignity
today? Am I honoring it within myself and making myself a zone of peace, making
my family a zone of peace, and working to make this world a planet of peace? Am I
fulfilling my human responsibility to the highest extent possible? In my job,
in my job as whatever one is doing whether they’re doing carpentry, medicine, law,
anything to bring excellence and dignity to what they’re doing and to demand of
our institutions that express our social values, the expression of these values
of peace and love. We have to do this. We can’t put this off for a day. It is time.
It is time. The time is now Jonathan. Let me on that note just take a quick pause
and remind our audience that this is the YonEarth communities stewardship
and sustainability podcast series YonEarth
Oh, let’s talk about why. And
today we are visiting with Jonathan Granoff and we’re going to put in the
show notes several resource links that you can explore. This includes the
Nobel Peace Laureate Summit, the Global Security Institute, the Parliament of
World Religions, the International Law Section of the American Bar Association,
Move the Money, the Peace Pledge Project, and the United Nations TV video that
Jonathan referenced that included him and Michael Fitzpatrick back in 2015 will
include all that. I want to be sure to thank all of our sponsors for making this
series possible and for making our community mobilization work throughout the
country and internationally possible. These sponsors include the Association of
Walder Schools of North America, Beauty Counter, Earth Coast Productions, Equal
Exchange, the International Society of Sustainability Professionals, the LIDGE
Family Foundation, Madera Outdoor, Patagonia, Puriam, and Waylay Waters. And of
course a very special thank you to all of you individuals in the YonEarth
community who have joined our monthly giving program. It is with your support
that we’re making this possible and that we are reaching more and more people in
communities all over. And if you haven’t yet joined the monthly giving program,
you can go right to yonearth.org slash support or just go to the homepage and hit
the donate button. And when you sign up at any level that works for you, I will
send you an email with a special code that you can use to download unlimited
free copies of our ebook and audiobook resources to share with friends, with
family, with colleagues, anyone in your community. So be sure to check that out if
you haven’t yet. And it is such a joy, Jonathan, to have this opportunity to
visit with you. And I, we can talk some about YonEarth, of course, happy to do
that. I also want to ask you about the the history, the transition into the
nation state. What was the reason for that? What lessons might we learn? Of
course many of us live in nation states we all do basically. And we probably
take for granted it wasn’t always this way. Right. And it’s just something I
think it’s really important that we’re aware of. Well, the modern state was a
creation in the 17th century. In the 17th century, the main event in the western
world was the 30 years war where Catholics and Protestants were slaughtering
each other and massive numbers in central Europe. Maybe a third of the
population was wiped out. And they were going to keep killing each other as
around the issue of whose understanding of Jesus’ love was better. And there
were, there were, there were some walks from the northern part of Europe. People
learning in the law thought, well, the institutions that we have, the governing
institutions are unable to constrain these irrational passions. And they met
in a place called Westphalia in 1640s and created the modern states. And through
a bunch of treaties in which you had Protestant states and Catholic states. So
you could separate the people who were fighting for their understanding of God’s
will. I think it was really their own their own will at issue because God’s will
is moving from love of self to selfless love. And the modern state comes out of
that discussion, that dialogue of unsung heroes, I believe. Now they wouldn’t have
been able to do this if a technological innovation hadn’t also occurred
around that time. A hundred years before then when the world was that part of
the world was the Holy Roman Empire and city states, the feudal society as we
knew it. If you were in Leone, you didn’t speak pretty much the same language as
somebody in Normandy or Paris. Or if you were in Naples, you didn’t speak the
same language as somebody in Rome. But in between this period,
Scott Guttenberg came up with a printing press that created a coherent language
and grammar. So you had a similar language, a local language, not Latin, which is
the language of the Holy Roman Empire, in Germany, a German, an Italian, a French,
and you could create a national identity around using language. So the
technological innovation of the printing press was really important in creating
the identity of the modern state. Today we have the internet, which creates a
global identity, commensurate with the political institutions necessary for the
governance of our world today. And we’re at a moment in which we simply have to
identify the global existential threats that face humanity, use the
communications and transportations capacities and modern technology to weave
the human family into a recognition of its oneness and its and our
integrated fate. And a lot of this comes from answering the question, why? And
you know, I want to put a link on this also to when at the millennium, the
government of India produced a book called Imagining Tomorrow, the first essay
was by the Secretary General, and it had many of the world’s great thinkers and
leaders imagining what the world of tomorrow should be like. And I was privileged,
they asked me to write an essay on International Law, which is basically my
expertise, International Law and Security. And every time I sat down to write it,
it was like, well, everybody knows you need, you need the rule of law for
security. It was, I didn’t think there was anything new or insightful that I
could say. So I prayed. And what came to my heart was I should write the highest
truth that I can understand. And I did. And I wrote an essay called the Forgotten
Why. And I thought to myself, we have forgotten the why of things. And the
consequences, we’ve become very preoccupied with technique or how. The
consequence being, the consequence being a financial system not rooted in
goods and services, not in harmony with the natural world. But a financial
system preoccupied with the amassing of capital, which is the how of lubricating
economics, but not the why. A medical system addressing symptoms, not healing.
Modern art, largely about art, about art, not about beauty and inspiration.
Religion, without love and transcendence preoccupied with rights,
rituals, practices and dogmas. Philosophy, modern philosophy is largely taught
as the technique of philosophy. Law, with loss, so preoccupied, I practiced, I
practiced law for several decades in the commercial world. So I saw how so much
of the law is preoccupied with procedure rather than its main purpose, which is
justice. And the pursuit of security through weaponry, ironically, the more
which we perfect, the less security we obtain. The nuclear weapons being the
most burlesque example of that. And we’ve just pledged 1.7 trillion dollars to
modernize the US arsenal and others are following suits. So we’re entering into a
horrible arms race. Because they believe that this how will bring greater why
of security, but it’s wrong. Security is not going to be obtained by more
weaponry, economic harmony with the natural world by more capital, human health,
by isolating symptoms from causes, religions failing to expand loving
kindness and compassion and preoccupied with the definitions of theology and
differences of identity and rituals. So I wrote, the forgotten why. And I thought to
myself, how to express the why of the human endeavor. And I think for me, it’s
really inarticulable. It’s mysterious. It’s so profound. I mean, just the basic
consciousness of being human is is so magnificent and mysterious. Let me give
an example. There’s something inside of our hand that touches, but you can’t touch
it. Like if we cut open your hand or my hand, we won’t see the thing that
touches. Well, there’s something inside of our eyes. There’s a light in your
eyes and a light in your eyes and light in my eyes that sees, but you can’t see
that. You can’t see the thing that’s seeing. There’s a thing inside of us that
knows. And where is that? In other words, if if we cut air and open, we see that
thing in you that knows. No, we’re right. It’s so the most intimate part of our
being, our knowing, our awareness is mysterious and wondrous and humbling if
you look into that. It’s humbling if you look into that. So I think very much
part of the and the why since time immemorial have said that there’s this
deep relationship between the pursuit of kindness and compassion and patience
and the pursuit of virtue and the kind of knowledge that reveals the inner
self. And it’s not necessarily accessible to the intellect, but it is
accessible to the heart. And my I’m on the Board of Advisors of the Jane Goodall
Institute. And I command anyone to look at some of the dialogues that Jane and
I have had together on the internet. And Dr. Goodall, who’s an inspiration to me,
said that the distance that modern man has to travel is from the mind to the
heart. And the great Sufi master with whom I study,
Bala Mahaidin said that the key to modernity’s successful failure will be are we
capable of separating from ourselves that which separates us from others. So on
one level, it’s our race, religion, gender, et cetera, that separates us and our
common humanity brings us together. But on another level, it’s anger, falsehood,
jealousy, all forms of selfishness that affirm the illusion of separation that
separates us. And what brings us together is love, compassion, patience,
tolerance brings us together not only with each other, but with our own self. So
I think part of the why is discovering our own humanity is discovering the
mysterious power that gives us breath and life that we cannot neglect, neglect
honoring the sacred in our lives. That that’s not something the state can do.
It’s not something in politics. It’s something independent of all conditions in
all circumstances. In all conditions, we have an obligation to honor the sacred
gift of life, this temporary journey that we share together. And those who
engage in that will find that there is virtue within themselves and to find ways
of bringing that into action. And that’s the why. That’s what I believe is the
why. I love it. That’s what I believe is the why. It’s not a real new idea, you know.
And and that our political institutions, when they reflect that inherent
dignity, even if even if we pay the price of hypocrisy and falling short and
achieving it, are empowered by that, that is the inspiration that comes from
that pursuit. So I did this movie of the creation of America, the Constitution,
and studied deeply the character of the people that were so instrumental in
the miracle in Philadelphia in 1787. And a lot of them were not really very
elevated. They were just there for economic reasons, which is good. I mean,
economics is a great is I mean, producing wealth is very important for a
society. But there were others who understood that stability in society and
peace in society and the balance of power and the balance that would allow
dynamism and creativity, but check arrogance was really a genius. And these guys
were really deep reflective people. I mean, you know, Benjamin Franklin was a
deep guy. I mean, he was not, he wasn’t a saint, he wasn’t perfect, but he was
concerned with developing his character. Seriously, he even went so far as to
develop a system of evaluating character development, where he graded
himself, you know, how did I each day, like how did I do on compassion and justice
and patience and love. And then he hit a wall when he tried to do humility, like
how do you grade yourself on humility? So I think it’s a colon. It’s a colon.
It is. Right. But for the state, how the state has to operate, it is the
public. We have a duty to hold our politicians accountable to these virtues.
And the way in which we temper it is not by punishing them by being for their
arrogance, because you need to kind of like arrogant people to be good
politicians. They got to be real up about themselves, you know, it’s called law.
And checks and balances and the rule of law in which our political leaders have
to be accountable to the law. And if we throw that away and allow political
leaders to operate above the law and game the law and degrade the law and degrade
the institutions of law, we are we are facing tyranny and chaos and destruction.
The law in a way is a externalization of conscience when it when it is fulfilling
the principles of justice. So they’ve forgotten why I’m going to put a link to
that. Great. Yeah, we will add that there’s another moment, another miraculous
moment around the time of the formation of our country here, which is Washington
refusing. Yes, to essentially become a king. Yes, yes, very important. And what
he’s doing in that moment is saying, no, this is about the law. This is about
the institution. This is not about me as an individual rising to a position of
omnipotence or whatever it might be. Right, right. Right. I think he realized
his mortality. He realized his own limitations. And he saw the benefit of
making the citizens run the country. And so when he left, he was very proud to
become a citizen. Now, this principle of service, I mean, we’re willing to
clerk in who’s, you know, really courageous man, risked his life to end
apartheid in Mexico at the summit of the Nobel laureate said, politics is a
calling is a calling, but not not just a profession. So we had a discussion
about it. And I suggested that politics is a calling the currency of being the
pursuit of the common good, not the pursuit of self aggrandizing identity and
power. And George Washington was an example of that. But we have even bigger
examples of that. There’s examples of the prophet Muhammad being offered to be
the king and leader of the world, or being a servant of compassion and love
and and patience and kindness. And he and he decides that he would rather be
the servant of the qualities of God. People in the West don’t understand
that’s normative Islam. It’s not Wahhabism that’s coming out of Saudi Arabia or
the Ayatollahism in Iran. But that and so that that’s why over a billion people
are attracted to this faith because its core leader doesn’t say that he’s a
God. He says he’s a servant of compassion. The Buddha calls us to be servants
of compassion. And in the instance when Jesus is in the wilderness and given the
choice of ruling the world and what is it with Satan, right? Notice he do. He says,
get behind me. This ego, the ego, I’ll rule the world. No, no. And what is what
does he do? He says, I’ll give my life for love. Or Socrates. Socrates is
offered his freedom knowing that the that the state of Athens has wrongfully
convicted him of challenging, of destroying the state, right? It’s a wrongful
conviction. The trial is a fix. But I’ll drink the hemlock because the law is so
important for the community. He gives up his personal life for the benefit of
others. And you and I today are the beneficiaries of what these people have done.
In every instance, whether it’s I don’t like to put Washington together with
you know, at the same level of Jesus. But the principle is what Jesus would say is
important. You know, the principle, God’s principle of love for others and
compassion, that those qualities, if you find anybody trying to and buy those
qualities, they will have humility. Because it’s not easy. It’s not easy to
be loving and kind. Because it involves also patience. And we seem to want
everything now. It involves humility, which is not very, you know, we don’t have
a lot of teaching of humility in our school system, right? And in our always
about to be first, we were the winners, humility involves humility. It
involves reflection and and patience. We want immediate gratification in our
culture. Very in. It’s very in thinking in terms of
yin and yin. Yes. Yeah. There’s a balance. There’s a softness to it. It’s not
about always charging a head full steam. There’s a certain trust. Right. Right.
There’s a trust that we belong in this world. It’s not fallen. It’s not a
mistake. And that we can tune into it. And that there are principles of morality
and justice that can be applied in the affairs of human beings. And that’s
that is what’s at stake at this moment. It’s our very, it’s our very preciousness
of our humanity is being debated. Do we, do we really believe in democracy? Do
we believe that reason can overtake selfishness, passion, anger, false
legitimacy, racism, religious fanaticism, you know, is our humanity strong
enough? Is it time for those of us who believe in the dignity of every
person to step out and and say, well, we have a right to a clean planet. We
have a right to a balanced climate. We have a right to live and caring for the
poor. We have a right to a future. We’re not just going to consume everything
today. We have we have a duty to future generations. These are the
principles that are at stake today. And the thing is we know how to solve
these problems. We know, I know you’re an expert in regenerative agriculture
that if we would if we would do agriculture correctly, we could solve an enormous
amount of a climate problem. Other people are our experts in in diet. If we cut
down in the consumption of meat, but we could do a great deal to protect the
rainforest, which are being cut down to produce grain to produce hamburgers,
which do a great deal to drive people into hospitals with health issues, that
there are cycles of virtue that when you take one step in a good way, in a
beautiful way, many other things happen. I have great respect for the wisdom
of our traditions. And I’m a conservative in many ways. I think that when the
government of any country breaks its accountability to the people and is not
transparent and accountable, I join with the conservatives who say, well, I don’t
trust the government. Well, of course, I don’t trust the government. I don’t
trust any governments. That’s why Ronald Reagan was right. Trust but
verify. Well, you can’t verify without accountability and transparency. And
that’s built into the American system of justice that the president is no
higher than the homeless person in the eyes of the law. And when we start
treating the president as somehow like a king, then what did we fight the
American Revolution for? Why did we, and if we have distinctions of race, what
did we fight against Nazism about? I mean, what have we spent blood and
treasure as Americans for? But more importantly, what is it to be human in this
moment in history? Jonathan, it’s been an absolute delight and an honor to have
this opportunity to visit with you today. And we’re in no rush to wrap up. I’m
just curious if you might have any specific calls to action or advice for our
why-honored community audience. It’s a diverse group from communities all over
and for us to have this opportunity to hear from you with your
friendships and your networks working on so many of these essential issues. I’m
curious what you might share in that regard. Well, I did, I did have called the
action of asking these questions that we have to demand. We have to demand of our
political representatives. What, what are you doing to eliminate poverty? What
are you doing to protect the climate and the natural world? What are you doing to
get rid of nuclear weapons? Because each of these unpacks enormous, they’re
like acupuncture points in our society. And each of us to ask ourselves each
day, what values am I finding within myself? What are my, you know, what are my
most beautiful qualities within myself that makes me human? That makes me
fulfilled. And you’ll find if you, if you do that, there is a greater power.
Some call it God. Some just say it’s beyond words that gives us life. And that’s
humbling. And then you start to open up and then to ask yourself, how am I living
in accordance with that, with my wife, with my children, with my family, with my
community? How am I supporting people and institutions that go forward with
this? Money is a way of expressing values. So we were, so I’m involved in the
wealth and count the money where we’re, where move the money. You’ll see the
website to just say what we’re spending way too much money on, on millet, on the
pursuit of security through military means. Well, military means have not done
real well when Alexander the Great tried to invade, in this valley around, you
know, from Pakistan, onward. It didn’t do real well in the Soviet Union invaded
Afghanistan or when we invaded Afghanistan or Vietnam or Kashmir or the
Middle East or Chechnya, these, these don’t really bring the kind of security
in peace that we need. What does bring security in peace is promoting the
well-being of others as you care for yourself. That’s what works. The business
community understands it’s the business community is going global. The
business community has a legal regime through arbitration where, where contracts
are honored globally, we know how to govern ourselves. But the disproportionate
power of a few right now, a few, of a few, is distorting our public
dialogue. But we’re not accountable for them and we’re only here for a short
time. We are each accountable for ourselves. So the fourth question that we all
have to ask ourselves is, what are the deepest values that we have and how am I
bringing them as best as I can into action? And to really, really do our best to
bring the qualities of loving kindness and compassion into action. Yes, love
well, and I love how Socrates created an axiom that wisdom necessarily leads
to action. Yes, but he said that you can’t, it’s difficult to pursue wisdom. So he
said you can’t really pursue noces or wisdom, but you can pursue virtue. So and so
he defined virtue, of course, as caring for others and these perennial
qualities. And when our nation pursues these qualities by taking care of
children, by having education, by having health care, when any nation does
that, it blossoms. I mean, look at, look at Sweden, for example, Sweden recognized
before other countries the impact of technology on the natural world. So they
established what they call the precautionary principle, which means that if
you’re going to put a chemical or something like that into the environment, you
have to show that it will do no harm. The American Chamber of Commerce said, oh,
this will wreck the economy of this country. On the contrary, their economy has
boomed. We don’t have that principle in our laws in the United States and we
should. And so so one of the things that that that our public institutions have to
do now is recognize that our our economic order is based on the premise of
infinite expansion. The natural world doesn’t work that way. 300 years ago,
there was no garbage. We’re producing more garbage than we can get rid of. We’re
turning the we’re turning the planet into as if we’re a resource and not a
living system of which we are a part. And it’s simply not not accurate. Our
accounting, for example, doesn’t take into or our general accounting
principles in our institutions doesn’t take into account the pollution of
water, air, and enter. These are realities that are considered externalities that
are simply passed on the cost of which the future generations are accounting
should should account for the use of these resources. But behind all of this
is America has stood for that those principles as best as we can. That’s what
makes America great. And any society in which these principles are applied is
great. There are there are so many blossoming things you see on the planet. I
mean Bhutan has proposed that not only do we need a a a a GNP gross
national product of just producing things but we should also care about
producing happiness. Right? And it turns out that a lot of the like for
example, it’s very difficult for a person to be happy if they don’t have one
bed. You need one bed. But the difference between having one bed and five beds
in your house in terms of happiness is minimal. But going from no bed to one bed
is a big leap. But after you have one bed, three square meals a day, adequate
health and security, your happiness is dependent on a lot of other things other
than merely acquiring stuff. It’s it your happiness is dependent on
expressing your human values, your social relationships, your artistic
appreciation and creativity, your engagement in in in helping others. Those are
the metrics of happiness they found out. So economists are now starting and
educators are now starting to include happiness in the pursuit of happiness in
in their in their in their metrics. Schools are saying are students do better
when they’re happy rather than shamed into doing well. Happiness. Doctors are
discovering that our health is better. Yeah. Who knew right? I mean it seems so
self evident, right? Yeah. But but it but apparently we haven’t organized our
institutions around the knowledge and the wisdom that we’re that we are
affirming. Happiness is very important and happiness comes more from an open
heart than from the selfish acquisition of vanity and power. Happiness comes
from the open hand better than the fist. Absolutely. Beautiful Jonathan. Yes. Thank
you so much for visiting with us today. Oh, anytime, Aaron. It’s great to talk
about good things. Especially as a lawyer where we’re usually you know I mean
look it’s a beautiful place. It’s a beautiful day. Yeah. This is this is my
home. We’re in the backyard of my home in New Jersey. It’s beautiful and to be
able to sit and talk with a brother about things of the heart and things of
significance is you know it’s truly a pleasure and and thank you for doing this
show. Thank and for people that are watching this is the kind of media that
needs to be spread. Tell your friends about it. Share these talks with with
other people because these are discussions that matter and we’re in a period in
history in which ideas and ideas and vision are significant and and and and
think of think of your own vision and think of your own best vision and share
it. Wonderful. Thanks everybody. The YonEarth community stewardship and
sustainability podcast series is hosted by Aaron William Perry, author, thought
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