Dr. Thomas Daffern
We vow to abstain from economic violence,[1] exploitation and oppression against others[2] (and ourselves); we vow to work towards a world where everyone has enough for their need but not for their greed;[3] we vow to work, in whatever our professional capacities, whether as lawyers,[4] judges, teachers, architects, civil servants, bankers, financial experts, in retail, management, business, agriculture, tourism, the arts, IT, communication, media, industry etc.[5] in a way that is without violence to our fellow man or to the environment and to nature or to the Divine Reality,[6] in a way in which our work is conducted with integrity and honesty,[7] and which serves the well being and happiness of society as a whole;[8] we vow to help use our professional careers as service vehicles for planetary enlightenment,[9] and to factor in the ethical side of our professional practice at all stages of our careers, so that we can see the contribution to peace that we are individually and collectively making.[10] We vow to help assist the development of a green economics[11] in which wealth is understood as the fruit of natural systems plus human ingenuity, to be shared peacefully and morally by us all.[12] We vow to abstain from all criminal economic activities which denigrate, destabilise and destroy human culture and happiness. [13] We vow to pay as a matter of principle those who work for us a decent salary, so that every citizen will get opportunity for self-development above mere minimal existence.[14]
Economic violence can take many forms it can be a form of domestic abuse where one partner controls the purse strings and uses it to bully their partner, or children (or relatives); or it can be an expression of corporate power, when powerful and wealthy corporations can bully whole communities into following their will to the detriment of the natural environment or the community; or it can be austerity measures laid down by the International Monetary Fund or the World Bank or other financial institutions, such as the European Union central banking system, which demand of whole nations incredible austerity programmes to the detriment of the common people, as happened in Greece in recent years; many forms of violence, such as violent crime, also have an economic dimension
For example all forms of subtle or overt slavery, or exploitation of child labour; in the 19th century Britain paved the way globally to abolishing slavery, and also abolishing child labour with various parliamentary reforms acts; but slavery still exists in some remote places around the world, even if now all countries have officially declared that slavery is illegal in all of them. Not until the 20th century was slavery abolished in all countries, and the timeline of this makes interesting and uncomfortable reading. The dates of the abolition of slavery in countries in the 20th century are as follows: 1921 Nepal; 1922 Morocco; 1923 Afghanistan; 1924 Iraq; 1926 Convention to Suppress the Slave Trade and Slavery bound all signatories to end slavery; 1928 Iran; 1928 Sierra Leone. 1935 Ethiopian Empire; 1936 Northern Nigeria; 1948 UN Article 4 of the Declaration of Human Rights bans slavery globally (in theory if not in practice); 1952: Qatar; 1958 Bhutan; 1960 Niger; 1962 Saudi Arabia; 1962 Yemen; 1963 United Arab Emirates; 1970 Oman; 1981 Mauritania. But formal slavery is only one kind of economic exploitation, there is also debt slavery, debt bondage, and wage slavery, and unemployment and cycles of poverty generation after generation, all of which cause psychological as well as economic hardship and really therefore constitute a form of economic oppression
This saying is from Gandhi, whose exact words were spoken orally to his secretary: "The Earth provides enough to satisfy every man's need but not for every man's greed" as quoted by Pyarelal Nayyar in Mahatma Gandhi: The Last Phase (Volume 10) (1958) p 552. Gandhi's ideas influenced many economists including E.F. Schumacher (1911-1977) author of Small is Beautiful (1973)
Gandhi was trained as a lawyer in London. He always felt they had a special duty to try to work not just in "winning cases" (ie acting as paid protagonists, morally neutral) but also as upholders of the moral integrity of the whole legal profession and the legislative process. In Gandhi, M.K. The Law and Lawyers, (Navijan Trust, Ahmedabad, 1962), p. 144, he said" The learned judges have laid down principles of legal conduct which, in our humble opinion, are open to question. For instance, what is the meaning of "those who live by the law must keep the law"? If it means that no lawyer may ever commit a civil breach without incurring the displeasure of the court, it means utter stagnation. Lawyers are the persons most able to appreciate the dangers of bad legislation and it must be with them a sacred duty by committing civil breach to prevent a criminal breach. Lawyers should be guardians of law and liberty and as such are interested in keeping the statute book of the country pure and undefiled" one suspects that were he alive today he would very much support the spiritual o the Jaipur declaration. Its author spent many years working with the Gandhi Foundation in London and organising its School of Nonviolence project, working with the late Surur Hoda, and Lord Attenborough among many others, in keeping Gandhi's flame alive in the UK
Most people spend most of their adult lives in some kind of work, following some kind of profession or trade; each trade has an inherent dignity and can be undertaken with a minimum of violence and harm to others, it is up to each profession in this list, and others not listed, to examine its own conscience as to its own conduct
Again, it is for each professional working context to work out how best to minimise violence and to remove all gratuitous violence from its working practices, including things such as work place bullying and mental violence and cruelty against other staff; working relationships often become fraught and jealousy, envy and greed can poison working relations; workplace mediation schemes exist to resolve these kinds of issues non-violently; relationships between trade unions representing the work force and management can also on occasion descend into violence, of thought word and deed, as happened during the Miners Strike in Britain in the 1980's when people were attacked and beaten by the police; some working environments also commit acts of violence against nature, such as nuclear power accidents like at Fukushima, Chernobyl or Three Mile island. Whistleblowers who seek to report or correct such issues, like Karen Silkwood (1946-1974) can sometimes be the victims of criminal murder to silence them. Cases like this are going on in a small way all over the planet, as powerful people seek to silence the little people and prevent them talking out our Declaration says "Enough is enough" the small still voice of truth needs to be finally heard. Dharma is the Sanskrit name for the Divine Order which underlies everything acts of gratuitous violence are acts against Dharma, the Divine reality
Management experts have discovered that work undertaken with integrity and honesty leads to greater happiness and well being among the staff, as in the Google slogan "Don't Be Evil". Integrity comes from a root meaning "wholeness" to be truthful means to see the whole picture of something, to see the widest possible view. Acharya Mahapragya expertly defined the relationship of ahimsa and truthfulness saying "Without truth or right world-view the practice of the view of ahimsa is not possible. It means that one cannot practice "Ahimsa Vrata" unless he is truthful. So truth is naturally the super objective" (See Acharya Mahapragya, Philosophical Foundation of Jainism, 2002) p.106. What this means ultimately is that we are not going to get a world free of himsa (harm, violence) until we abolish dishonesty, and rediscover the power of truth, which is why my International Institute of Peace Studies and Global Philosophy has founded the Truth And Reconciliation Commission For The Middle East as well as the Truth And Reconciliation Commission for Britain and Ireland. But scholars also need to examine why people are addicted to lying, as in the work of Barnes, J. A. A pack of lies: towards a sociology of lying (Cambridge University Press, 1994) in which discusses the status of lying in politics, war, bureaucracies, family relations, courts and the law, advertising, the police. It is an important study. The philosopher Bernard Williams approaches the same problem from the other end in his work, Truth and truthfulness: an essay in Genealogy (2004) as does Simon Blackburn in Truth: a guide for the perplexed (2006). The author's own proposal is to enact a law in parliament that requires politicians, civil servants and government bureaucrats to tell the truth about all official matters) at all times, and if they have ben found out deliberately lying, this would be a sacking offence, leading to the end of their term of service. Why on earth should we have gotten used to the idea that politicians should be allowed to lie and get away with it? the question of the moral responsibility of George Bush and Tony Blair for unleashing the "War on terror" is a case in point, when all the evidence that is beginning to come in, makes to look as if 9/11 was not all that the official media reported: the twin towers and building 7 cannot have been brought down, according to highly trained engineers and architects, by the impact of the two planes that hit on 9/11 and the fires that were started then. Steel of the kind that kept the twin towers in place, and building 7, simply does not melt or become weakened at the temperatures of fires of that sort, and never in architectural history have such building come down with fires of this kind., This means that someone must have had foreknowledge of the planes striking the towers, and had planted nanothermite to bring the buildings down square into their footprints. This is scary, because it means that the politicians launched the War on Terror, "on a lie", and on the basis of a false flag operation. The facts explaining these disturbing conclusions are admirably summarised by the philosopher and theologian Prof. David Ray Griffin, in his numerous works, most usefully in his masterly study: Griffin, David Ray 9/11 Ten Years Later: When State crimes against democracy succeed (2012).
Profit is visualised at present in most economic models on too short term a basis. We need to factor-in the long term spiritual wellbeing of the community in which we are working. The spirit behind the Jaipur declaration is that by telling the truth to one another, by creating a climate of truthfulness, honesty, integrity and transparency, we are more likely to stimulate lasting and worthy economic and social enterprises, and to raise our quality of living together on this planet
This statement is premised on the idea that whatever our calling in life, from humble street sweeper up the managing director of a huge firm, or a classroom assistant up to master of a Cambridge University College, we can use our field of service as a way of giving back to the planet as a whole, to mankind at large, if we do our work as well as we can, as conscientiously, and with as much intelligence and imagination as we can muster. As the Zen saying has it, and as the life story of Hui Neng illustrates, after enlightenment, you still go on carrying water and chopping wood, but it's the interior landscape that has changed. What would the political economy of our planet look like if enlightenment became the general rule, rather than restricted to the gnostic elite? The word service is likewise carefully chosen: in the Tattvartha Sutra, 5.21 the classic Jain manual of philosophical wisdom, it is said "Parasparopagraho jivanam, souls render service to one another" see Umasvati That Which Is: Tattvartha Surtra (Sacred Literature Series, 1994)
By doing our work ethically, we are more likely to contribute to peace in the long run, both personally and collectively
There are a number of economists developing a "green economics" as a priority; the work of the New Economics Foundation and the Green Economics institute (Oxford) are two examples of the move towards a rethinking of economics along green lines; the Global Green University is also trying to advance thinking in this direction. At our conference in Jaipur the search for a green economic approach to solving basic social and economic problems was evident with good news stories coming from many different participants. The Director of the Sustainability Laboratory (Michael Ben-Eli) was one of the keynote speakers and workshop presenters at the event
Marx said all wealth comes from labour; Quesnay, the founder of classical modern economics, said all wealth comes from nature. Obviously, both are only half right: real wealth comes from nature's bounty plus applied human ingenuity
Unfortunately criminal activities currently occupy a lot of economic energy on the planet; militarism (armies, navies and airforces, plus all their heavy duty equipment) burns more carbon emission and uses more resources than any other equivalent peaceful activity; underworld gang s use extreme violence to cement their monopoly of the drug trade, of international money laundering, and generally to pander to human corruption, moral weakness and greed. One solution, one way to decriminalise the planet and to enable an end to the violence that crime causes, is for each of us to take a personal vow not to fuel the flames of such criminality any more.
This refers to a proposal to Acharya Mahashraman by Fons Delnooz in a spontaneous personal communication during a visit of delegates from the Jaipur Conference to Bikaner where Shri Mahasharaman resided at that moment. The authors later wrote their ideas down, the result of which is published in these proceedings under the title "The 12th Anuvrat: Jains leading India's downtrodden out of poverty?, also published on the Berlin Jain website HereNow4U: http://www.herenow4u.net/index.php?id=99002
