Two very interesting, and very different, big picture views of our
current world and current situation have come across my view recently.
Both are worth your attention.
Meta-historian William Irwin Thompson, writes, with his typical grand sweep, of Al Qaeda, the Neocons, and the Transition from Nation-State to Noetic Polity in Ocean Arks International's Annals of Earth (but available on line here, about 2/3 down the page):
This new historical situation is one in which
we are shifting from the era of a global industrial economy of
territorial nation-states to a planetary cultural-ecology of noetic
polities (a noetic polity is one based on consciousness and not
territorial identify). The war against Islamicist terrorism is not a
war against a territorial nation-state; it is a conflict against a
noetic polity that seeks to destroy the secular modernism of the
industrial nation-state to replace it with regional Caliphates in a
single global Islamic civilization. In a medieval Caliphate, the leader
rules for life, so it is not surprising that modern-day Caliphs like
Gaddafi in Libya, Mubarak in Egypt, and Hassad in Syria, rule for
decades and are not subject to the Western politics of election and
re-election.
Paradoxically, enemies tend to become like one another through conflict. "We become what we hate...." The American soldiers that died in Iraq did not
die "defending their country"; they died defending Cheney and Bush's
interests in Halliburton and the Carlyle Group. These neocon corporate
managers, very much like the privateers and pirates that helped Queen
Elizabeth create a postbaronial world of naval power, are offshore
pirates that care as little for the entire nation, as Texan Enron cared
for the state of California it plundered. Historically, these neocon
managers have moved beyond national patriotism, and only have need of
patriotic propaganda and national armies to provide them with the
soldiers they need to advance their mafia Don aims. So when Saddam
Hussein was not co-operating with Cheney and Rumsfeld, it was decided
by the Defense Policy Board of Pearle, Woolsley, and Wolfowitz to take
him out but call this mafia hit "the installation of democracy in
Iraq" -- this even before Bush Jr. was chosen by the party to be its
publicist.
From another coast (or another planet) Victor Davis Hanson offers Into the Tar Pits: Dinosaurs either evolve or die in National Review Online.
What has happened? Sometime around the 1980s, the Right saw the demise of the Soviet Union as an opportunity to evolve beyond realpolitik
to promote not just anti-Communism but grassroots democracy, coupled
with free-market globalism from Eastern Europe to Latin America and
Asia. In contrast, the hard Left stayed in its knee-jerk suspicion of
the West and continued to give a pass to authoritarians from Cuba to
Iran who professed socialism, thinking that the world was a static
zero-sum game in which somebody's gain spelled another's loss --
oblivious that real wealth could be created by a change of mentality
and technology and not mere exploitation....
Action and results, not rhetoric and intentions, are what matter. Cease
blaming others for declining popularity. There is neither a Karl Rove
conspiracy nor an envisioned red-state theocracy. No, the problem with
our Left is what killed the dinosaurs: a desire to plod on to oblivion
in a rapidly evolving world.
I've been keeeping the politic rhetoric limited on this blog, and the
focus more professional, for a variety of reasons. But I'm expecting
that both these pieces will intrigue you and both will piss you off.
And maybe generate some new and uncomfortable thoughts, which is good
medicine in this day and age.
So have at 'em.
8:42:54 PM 
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