As always I am in harmony with everything you say. I make no qualification. If it appears that I do then I have expressed myself badly. My eagerness to pursue clarity between us and in my understanding of our universe may make it seem otherwise. It never is.
In this vein let us consider views on illegal immigration, jobs and other apparent conflicting economic interests. Outside the Garden of Eden or Nirvana such is to be expected.
However why should American and European workers fear outsourcing using the Internet? In my view, as expressed to you in "Integral Economics", at the dawning of the Age of Aquarius with its knowledge based value and values, this is simply not an issue. Economics ceases to exist.
Jobs outsourced to India increase the wealth of Indians. The Indian middle class will soon be as large as the whole US population. This creates an even bigger market for American goods. Creative well living Americans, who have lost their jobs elsewhere, can move to supplying their needs. The USA has the know how, experience and systems to do so. Nowhere else on the planet does one find so many new jobs generated so fast as when Americans create better:-
- more comfortable holidays with scenary, art music, food, etc to die for;
- ever more effetive ways to organize production and distribution
- understanding among more and more people at an ever increasing rate.
These things together mean that jobs lost to the needy in India, China, Indonesia and the Spanish speaking world (including illegal but useful immigrants into the US from Central America) only create more and more better jobs for Americans. The emerging knowledge economy is truly WIN WIN WIN.
This seems like a return to the Garden of Eden. Hunter gathers then had only to reach up and grab the fruits from any tree bar one, the tree of knowledge. In choosing to take from it they became aware of property, the idea that one could own a part of the Universe. One could fence it off and own land to cultivate things rather accepting it as free to all. "Don't Fence Me In" and Free Range is not new to Americans. Many took part and died in the range wars that ensued from such sentiment.
Similar disputes are now evident on the Internet as evidenced by the recent Congressional hearings on the actions of Google, Cisco and others in helping the Chinese government draw boundaries in cyberspace. If they succeeed they can only harm themselves by separating themselves off from the cutting edge of emerging technolgy.
The universe did not abandon us when we acquired the capacity to create, use and distribute knowledge. After the flood came the Rainbow covenant. This holds out the promise of our future atonement (at-one-ment) with the universe and heaven. The knowledge age it seems may well brings this about.
We now do know that we are one in a way never before possible. Knowledge has enabled us to see ourselves and our planet from outside. This inspired James Lovelock when working for NASA to see then write about the idea of Gaia, It is this that inspired our mutual friend Jim Simms, a project manager on LandSat and on the Titan nuclear defence program. To this day that past inspires him as 80 to strive to use his systems engineering experience to unite science in the interest of mankind not his destruction.
This is the game we are in. It is a good game. The universe gives no guarantees that we ,humanity and our planet, are to be part of the solution but to me the odds are more for than against us. We do have to survive while we figger out how to make fusion work. Fossil fuels and renewables will not support us till then, the first may destroy us. Lovelock has recently gone argued that nuclear provides the only non-carboniferous way to bridge this gap in creative time.
In doing so we may have to worry about North Korea and Iran but not really. They can only make a few bombs. These will not be enough to destroy the planet or us. It could destroy there neighbours and themselves. Their capacity could leek so as to enable others to harm the rest of us. Your country rightly fears this.
We may have to worry about India and Pakistan. However your country, under the Bush administration, is doing precisely that. It has re-engaged with India on nukes. It is I suspect nudging Australia, my land of hope and residence, to supply the Indians with uranium as Australia is soon to do for China.
China is next on Condolezza Rice's and Bush's agenda. The Bush family is VERY well connected there. Bush Seniors CIA time in Beijing connected him, and his, with everyone that now matters in China. This is important for our human story. China and the USA are the only states left that could conceivably go to war in a way that could destroy the planet. Your leaders know this. They appear to be acting to limit that possibility.
We are left with the crazies .
Again the USofA under the current administration is on their case. That in part is what Iraq could be seen to be about. In harmony, the US and China, using Fu Ying, now the Chinese Ambassador to Australia but formerly head of the Asian desk of the Chinese Foreign Ministry in Beijing, with others helped put North Korea back in the box exactly at the time the US was contemplating invading Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Fighting on two fronts is always a bad idea.
Iran still seems a predicament for humanity. For the reasons outlined they are not a threat to human existence only to our feelings of security from mass terror. What is imagined could kill more people than 9/11. It could not destroy the planet.
In this the sand in all our oysters is Israel.
Speaking recently in the Middle East Condolezza Rica, acting for President Bush, declared that she felt the solution lay in a fully democratic Middle East. Now most of the USA's current friends in this region are NOT democracies so this is a very, very courageous thing for a so called oil greedy bullying American to say. The argument is clear. The evidence suggests democracies do not war with each other.
However liberal democracy has to be distinguished from democracy per se. In liberal democracy minorities are respected. They are not interfered with by the state and are protected by the state from any citizens who might wish to - the Amish, the Mormons etc in you country and many many more. Many muslims however, unfortunately, do not feel covered by this protection. There are 1000million of them on the planet and growing. Many are unhappy US and EU citizens. This is dangerous in a big, but not massive way. It can be fixed.
To do so requires them to feel part of the human family we are. They do not. It is to be noted that until very recently Christians and Jews were comfortably and securely living in many Islamic nations in the Middle East. Many still do.
However most Muslims believe that for centuries Christians agressively blocked their good intentions. The Koran makes Christians, Jews and Muslims as one under God. Muslims are told by God in the Koran that the Way to him is to unite mankind under his banner and end religious schism for ever. Given that he lived where Jews Christians and Muslims lived The Prophet guided by God's word in the Koran acted in an inclusive way. His vision encompassed Jews, Christians and Muslims and their religous books.
We must remember here that in the Balkans the Catholics and the Orthodox had been murdering each other in huge volumes from the 4th century on and the Roman empire had so ruthlessly dealt with the Jews that they were by then a diaspora throughout Europe and the Middle East.
The Muslims tried to show how peace and love under the one true God in which we all believe could achieve God's wishes. They are forbidden by God's word in the Koran to prozletise. They tried to act out these wishes in the 6th,7th 8th 9th 10th 11th 12th 13th centuries. They were attacked, raped and murdered, at every turn by Christians and others. The Muslims responded by using aggressive defense as the Koran directs, echoing God's words to the Jews. They gave back in kind what was meted out to them, and then some. Ruthless defense when attacked is fundemental to Islam. However in acting so one Muslims are obligated to stop fighting and treat with ones's attacker if he so wishes even if you do not. Unprovoked aggression is forbidden by Islam.
In the end they lost. Their politial leaders and holy men decided this must be because they were not true enough to God in their beliefs and actions. In the 14th Century they thus determined to return to fundamentals. They closed the Gates of Ishtehad, their gateway to the tree of knowledge. Till then scholarship banned elsewhere on the planet flourished under the protection of Islamic rulers. They were persecuted by the church in Europe, Galileo for example, had to recant “the truth" that the Earth went round the Sun in the face of the Inquisition. In North East Asia books were burned and scholars neutered by being made servants of the state (Mandarins) or otherwise suppressed or sidetracked as were despised entrepreneurs into cul de sacs of in effective activity – religion, flower arranging or the despised business of commerce.
The evil(?) of Islamic suppression of scholarship had one major unintended consequence. It led to what we see in the West as the Renaissance. This was a "good" thing? Its unintended consequence, for Islam, was that Western Europe and then America became economically and militarily powerful and so to be feared to an extent inconceivable in the 14th Century.
Left festering in Central Asia and the Middle East was suppressed Islamic beliefs un nurtured by scholarship. We in the West now reap the harvest we sowed in brutally suppressing Islamic aspirations to use knowledge to do good for all in the name of God's universe.
We need to help Islam find its Way to see us all again as one human family united in our wish to understand our common universe. By evidence of their actions many thoughtful people in the West and Islam agree. However an alientated Islamic community could still choose to act in a manner that led to our mutual destruction. For them this might be preferable to continuing to bear the shame of accepting humiliation in their honest attempt to do good and so love and be loved of God.
Israel, supported with billions of US tax payers dollars, is their symbol of their continuing humiliation by Christianity and Western decadence. They see us as the Sodom and Gomorrah of the present world. They may be right. The Americans who seem to agreeeing with them are the Moral "Majority" of fundamentalist Christians and some American Muslims no doubt.
I think all they ask is respect and our understanding that their only desire is that God’s Way, as they see it, be our Way to. Support for them, from us all to re-open the Gates of Ishtehad would be a good investment by humanity in itself. We can then join together in this New Age to gain access to the joy of helping to create and spread the wonder of knowledge and understanding of the universe we share.
How can we harm each other then. What is the point. We all gain, physically intellectually and spiritually from its advent. To achieve this we do not have to be imperative with should, must etc. We only need avoid judging people, right or wrong, good or evil. We just have to accept them as part of ourselves. We humanity at liberty to do what we feel is right. Each with a blank cheque to be wrong and so to be forgiven. Why should we not foregive, when all that has occured is that our individually feeble minds have failed to see the underlying good in an others actions.
It is our lack of knowledge that brings anger, then judgement and then self righteousness and then hate and then an implacable determination to expunge such an evil from our world. This is in humanity. It cannot be wished or desired away. Really, really decent people in the USA, Israel, Palestine, Iran and China allow this to happen all the time. Good caring, nay loving, opinions and hopes cannot eliminate this. The only thing that can is unconstrained plenty. This could come from unconstained knowledge creation and distribution. Atonement is an inevitable consequence of this not an aspiration. We only need to grasp it together.
When working and living in Kuwait I used to sit with my Kuwaiti friends's little kids on Saturday morning watching what I think in retrospect was Iraqi television. They are now around thirty. TWe often watched a religious cartoon early on Saturday morning, the Muslim holy day. It had jolly friendly little Smurf like cartoon characters in it.
These likeably little critters extolled the virtues of learning about the power of God's universe. These children were told it was their right and duty to God to work to understand it. After every sequence, of this Arabic religious Sesame Street, the little Smurfs would say God is Great, God is Good. The sage presenting the program an old Imam would repeat this. The program ended with a picture of a slowly expanding, entirely beautiful, mushroom cloud, a nuclear explosion. A true picture of the power in our universe. Was it a threat or a portend of our salvation? Lovelock, with me, would now suggest the latter.
Brian
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