Belinda wrote:I like this a lot, Leo, and I wish you would frame it in less seductively poetic language, for I know that I am too inclined to be carried away by rhetoric.
Painting me as the wily seducer is a novel experience for this balding old fart with missing teeth. However if the goal of the writer is to engage the mind of the reader this wordsmith feels he's doing his job. It's actually a very nice compliment, although rhetoric carries a pejorative undertone which I doubt you intended. The poeticism you detect is deliberate, and it reflects a quest for cadence, which can be difficult to achieve with prose. I use a few cheats, of course.
Belinda wrote:For instance if all the Palestinians recanted and professed to be and lived as religious Jews and good Zionists, would the troubles be over?
Not as simple as that, I fear. People will be "us" and "them" if their lives are informed by ignorance, and the spurious religious labels they choose are irrelevant. These are not religious folk but angry folk, and will always find ways to vent their spleen. Young blokes fight because they like it. It's as simple as that, and old blokes will always stand ready to offer them a "cause" to fight for. Those that fight know nothing of this cause and neither do they need to because they merely do what they're evolved to do. The time has come for humanity to evolve beyond this false agenda.
Belinda wrote:
Actually, I don't believe what I am writing because multiculturism doesn't work except as tolerant appreciation of the prettier aspects of others' cultures.
I'm not sure that I agree with this but my culture is quite different from yours. Our multiculturalism is far from perfect but our historical roots are interesting. Our convict background informed our values but this was not quite as it seems. Although many of the ordinary convicts were ordinary villains they were not of the worst type. The worst type, of course were hanged. These were the ordinary victims of social oppression in early industrial Britain, merely getting by as best they could. They were not educated and had few marketable skills. However there were another group of convicts who had a profound influence on the emerging Australian culture, and these were the political prisoners, who numbered in their thousands. These were the troublemakers, mostly Irish, who the plutocrats could not abide. These were both educated and educators and these were the men who shaped our future as rebels. Jack's as good as his master is no mere slogan in my country and egalitarianism is in our blood. Although inequality of opportunity is still a big problem it is universally acknowledged that this is un-Australian. In your country tugging the forelock to your betters is yet to go away, but we have no betters because we're the best.
Belinda wrote:. I would like to know if you think that the modern post enlightenment global culture is the be all and end all.
It's our only hope, and I mean this as forebodingly as it sounds. I have high hopes for the reckless anarchy of the internet but I recognise its hazards as well. Tough ****. The genie is out of the bottle and cannot be stuffed back in. We'll have to start educating our people in a hurry before it's too late, and we need totally new paradigms for doing this. Our educational models were designed to turn out factory fodder for the dark satanic mills, and these are the same models that we use today. We can hardly feign amazement that we're achieving the same result. Slaves. People spend money they don't have to buy crap they don't need so they can impress people they don't like. Does this sound to you like a sane social contract? All the biologist sees is his beloved biosphere being trashed in worship of Mammon and the miserable slaves turning on each other in despair.
When such things happen in living systems we call it a dis-equilibrium, in complexity theory a bifurcation. What follows this is a punctuation, more colloquially known as a catastrophe. Global warming is just such a catastrophe and exactly what humanity needs. As the uber-predator we both caused it and must retrieve it, and in this we dare not fail. Extinction is the lot of nature's failures and if it is to be ours then we deserve it.
My guess? I reckon we'll pass it easily and enter a golden dawn, and this not mere wishful thinking because I see the signs everywhere. Getting older is a pain in the ****, although it's far better than the alternative, but one of the advantages is that you can see change happening over larger time scales and most of these changes are positive. I have grandchildren, Belinda, thus I dare not see it otherwise, but I'm no dewy-eyed idealist. We survived the cold war and this is much easier.
Belinda wrote:but powerful individuals backed by some ideology or other are greedy for resources.
Democracy is government by the ignorant but I take a Churchillian stance on this. It's better than all the other options, and if people get the government they deserve then better educated people will get better government. Bellowing slogans and waving banners won't cut it because the societies of the future can only move when the minds of it's players move. Looking for people to blame is the mindset of a Nazi and a coward who shirks his moral culpability. If the money-lenders defile our temple then it's up to us to kick them out and simply bleating "too hard" is just a cop-out.
Belinda wrote: humans are not plants and behave willfuly.
As that wisest of sages, Kurt Vonnegut, points out in his seminal work, Galapagos, our super-brain is our super-challenge and we must learn how to use the bloody thing properly. Our destiny is our own to define.
Regards Leo