Is any Webdiarist interested in obtaining and reviewing for Webdiary The Next 100 Years, by George Friedman? It sounds interesting (as in – may you live in interesting times, perhaps), according to Black Inc Publishing:
In The Next 100 Years, George Friedman offers a lucid, highly readable forecast of the changes we can expect around the world during the twenty-first century. He explains where and why future wars will erupt (and how they will be fought), which nations will gain and lose economic and political power, and how new technologies and cultural trends will alter the way we live in the new century.
Drawing on history and geopolitical patterns dating back hundreds of years. Friedman shows that we are now, for the first time in half a millennium, at the dawn of a new era – with changes in store, including:
The US–Jihadist war will conclude – replaced by a second full-blown cold war with Russia.
China will undergo a major extended internal crisis, and Mexico will emerge as an important world power.
A new global war will unfold toward the middle of the century between the United States and an unexpected coalition from Eastern Europe, Eurasia and the Far East; but armies will be much smaller and wars will be less deadly.
Technology will focus on space – both for major military uses and for a dramatic new energy resource that will have radical environmental implications.
Written with the keen insight and thoughtful analysis that has made George Friedman a renowned expert in geopolitics and forecasting, The Next 100 Years presents a fascinating picture of what lies ahead.
big questions and ideas
Had forgotten about this thread. Yes indeed, there are deep difficulties in the varying approaches and emphases of different groups within religions and they can become irreconcilable approaches. In Christianity, for example, we have Unitarians lined up against Trinitarians, as with Newton and Leibnitz and which is a variation of a discourse going back to before the Council of Nicaea, on how one should view Christ, as per a proposition for a credible mechanism for the outworkings of reality thru time and place, in relation to different concepts of God.
This in turn goes back to speculation, amongst the classical Greeks for example, as to whether God is a creator or Divine Architect, who stepped back to allow things to work out over time with creation, without direct intervention so as to preserve free will, or whether God is an interventionist, activist God out and about in the world working at intimately complex levels. Also the riddle of reality itself. How could something come of nothing?
So many contingencies.
And not foolish, either. Do you lead your life by faith or reason? Are the two compatible or oppositional?
Not stupid; so many unknowns and variables and so much to do with what makes humans and existence human.
Fiona: Paul, has that book reached you yet?
Merry go round discussion
David L Wetzell, I'm not going to get involved in a merry go round discussion on religion. Apologists use ifs, buts, maybes and hopefully, when faced with overwhelming evidence as to the fraud the belief in God is. It's the reason we have so much conflict and disruption on the planet and why the next 100 years may not be recordable by humans, as we may be extinct.
This scenario is a probability when you look at the increasing debauched approach of the ideological human to life. The compounding factor and most common thread within all of the probable negative or more to the point fatal outcomes in the next hundred years, is God and its representatives, in all shapes, sizes and colour. If we look through history you find suppressive denialist ideologies always end in violent collapse and have never withstood the onslaught of evolution in the end.
The problem the Yahweh cult has to face is the very real evidence of its true history and not the thousands of years of deceit and lies it constantly pushes. The situation we face couldn't have arisen before this time, it's only been in the last 200 years the Yahweh cult has been able to spread its venom worldwide. The results are there for all to see, on every continent in destroyed cultures and decimated environments.
You make assumptions regarding the existence of Jesus and try to make out there's not enough evidence to either support or deny the truth of your belief. But there is a wealth of verified evidence showing us the events within the Bible never occurred as they are claimed and 90% are derived from previous mythological works, some many thousands of years older. None of the 35+ recorded writers in the immediate area at the time of the supposed Jesus happenings ever mentions anything. Neither does the recorded history of the two Jewish tribes of the times, or the recorded history of Herod. Who by the way happened to be dead before the events. The only other evidence which could support it is hearsay, not one personal account has been found. Add another little fact, Herod's kingdom was not part of the Roman empire. Herod was a friend and ally of Rome, not conquered. Meaning they had no jurisdiction over the implementation of the law.
There are hundreds more facts showing how far fetched the story is. It was a folk story distributed by story tellers who had their own versions written by scribes, so they fitted with their form of story telling and the area they worked. There's loads of evidence supporting that supposition, including the Dead Sea scrolls and Nag Hammadi library.
All we can hope for in the next hundred years is not a repeat of the last hundred, or previous two thousand years. So the planet and life gets some peace from the constant war against everything that lives, even the earth itself, by the fatalist Yahweh cult.
Aye, apologetics it is
Alga Kavanagh: "David L Wetzell, a truly interesting apologetics reply, trying to have one foot in each door is always filled with uncertainty and the chance you may split your dacks and reveal some unwanted reality. People who believe in god, no matter how they try to excuse and shy away from their guilt by association, always try desperately to distance themselves and their cult from the historic and present reality of their mythical delusions."
Well, doors more often than not are social constructs created by folks who had different feet across earlier doors, which isn't to deny that there are uses for such constructs, particularly for self-protection via picking sides in often ugly conflicts.
I'd say that the historic and present reality is quite complex and there is a need to make choices as to how one incarnates a belief in God one way or the other. Something similar can be said for those who claim to have been exorcised of their likely earlier beliefs in God.
Alga Kavanagh: "Isaac Newton did have a deep belief. He grew up and was programmed in a deeply religious family and studied to enter the church. He was convinced scientific investigation would lead to a greater knowledge of God whom he saw as the Creator of the universe. But he lived nearly 400 years ago and is a pathetic and primitive example to put forward for this day and age when science, cosmology, astrophysics, theoretical physics, verifiable history, archaeology, anthropology and chronological history shows us your Yahweh cult is just a primitive myth and its religious books false, plagiarised works of previous cultures from the distant past."
You know though, inquiry tends to be long-rooted and less removed in its fruits than we may be acculturated to believe to be the case. There is nothing in what you have mentioned that has exorcised the core of the Yahweh myth, just various speculative systems and institutional groupings that became associated with the myth.
As for plagiarization, it's quite hard to prove who plagiarized what from whom when it comes to the distant past and archaelogical evidence is still rudimentary and mixed, especially when you take into account how much politics got intermixed with perceptions about Christianity in the wake of the 30 years war in Europe. Inquiry is ideally supposed to be open to revision of its views in the face of evidence, but, at least in the short-run, we all get motivated by the axes we got to grind and so we may venture beyond what is in fact actually being verified or neglect certain normative suppositions in how we form our hypotheses.
Alga Kavanagh: "There is but one god and that is the god of Abraham, the one god all factions or offshoots of the Yahweh cult follow, anything else is just an apologist’s empty excuse."
Aye, but that doesn't mean everyone who follows that God is in the same ecclesial camp or sharing the same creed.
Alga Kavanagh: "There are no differences between Christians, Muslims and Jews in how they approach and treat life, just the time scale. Consider the thousands of years of constant Christian Jewish and Muslim wars, one side takes the lead in debauchery the others condemn it, then they change places."
Or maybe the terrible wars among the different groups have been wrong-headed from the get-go? The eschatological worldview of the NT, which holds in continuity with the OT developments, gives specific prophecies that it is not through armed conflict that we are supposed to witness to others about the kingship/rule of God. One of the best known summaries of this is The Politics of Jesus by John Yoder, an Anabaptist scholar, written in 1973, where he argues that the text of the New Testament, understood in its original context, makes it clear that Jesus' alternative to dying on the Cross was to lead a rebellion against Roman rule of Jerusalem, not unlike what actually happened forty years or so later. This rejection of the way of the Zealot is a critical precedent that subverts the way Christianity got perverted into the official religion of empire, in ways that may have contributed later to the rise of Islam and most definitely the persecution of Jews.
Alga Kavanagh: "It’s worse now as it encompasses the planet where in the past, it was localised. Just like politics, no difference – just the same pack of lies in different clothes."
No doubt the conflation of monotheism with empire is the worst possible combination, but is that consistent with the implied authorial intent found through a careful reading of their primary texts?
Alga Kavanagh: "It will be all of the USA which will implode and there will be little negative flow on effect, just the same as when the USSR collapsed and with probably the same results. However, the USA, because of its almost total reliance on its ego and faith in god, will suffer dramatically and will not be alone. Just like Rome, all other ideologies and suppressive regimes, they all come to an end when reality rolls over them."
Well, the USA may quite likely implode someday, it is highly unlikely the current situation is going to stay the same, nor is it desirable that the US's imperialism of the past century continue. We got way too many planks in our own democracy to be the one who has to be involved in "establishing" democracy anywhere else. My thoughts are that it's going to take grass/net-roots movements to both change state election rules and enable the proliferation of decentralized local third parties to hardwire adequate checks-n-balances into our existing two-party system that so easily becomes dominated by a single party and is too easily susceptible to the influence of $peech. (but I repeat myself)
Alga Kavanagh: "It's irrelevant as to whether the USA would have been better under a different political regime, what is relevant is the future and the fact continuing with the current approach is fatal, just as your god has been fatal to billions of life forms and cultures on the planet as it has swept the planet with its despotic invasions and genocidal conversions."
Wow, I guess it's good I've been writing about the future and discontinuing the current approach. And gee, thanks for giving me the inside scoop about what my God has been doing, I guess I must have missed that.
Alga Kavanagh: "What's really funny and primitively infantile is people still believe this god will come along and fix everything up for them and they will be forgiven for their greed, self centred gluttony and destroying the things their loving god supposedly created. Now that, to me, is primitive infantile stupidity and the main reason why religion has to use threats, destroy cultures, forcibly convert the people and as history shows us, kill them if they don't submit."
Difficulties in coping with uncertainty are ubiquitous and sadly we all make due with the legos we managed to get while growing up in constructing how we understand our situations. Top-down hierarchy or populist approaches that purport to have "short-cuts" that stunt needed inquiry, both fail to equip people with enough blocks to cope well and have had seriously tragic consequences.
Alga Kavanagh: "Make all the excuses and add all the illusionary hope you want, David, but facts are facts and reality is real, unlike your god, except within the primitive of mind."
Facts are never just facts, they are always interlaced with theories and normative presuppositions. Likewise, there's pretty much about as many ways to see that moving target called "reality" as there are ways to see "god". And the mind is a totally awesome organ, but not a very good master. It is itself is unreliable and, as much research has demonstrated, its perceptions need to be dealt with critically.
Alga Kavanagh: "The next hundred years will either be the end of god, or the end of humanity and life on earth. There is no room for both, as history and the current world situation show us."
Or more hopefully, we'll deconstruct those idols we associate with God such that they no longer serve as a point of contention.
Alga Kavanagh: "By the way, the former carpenter you speak of didn't exist and if you and every other believer actually studied the verified, documented written and anthropological cultural history, you'd have to agree. But to support myth, you have rely upon myth and not fact."
The concrete evidence from his time and place is generally quite scarce and there have been methodological shortcomings of attempts to go behind the text to the historical Jesus and so it's not the same to start with Jesus as Jesus was remembered by initial followers, unlike say with those who turned Buddha into a God two or three centuries after he lived. The time-gap between the purported historical event and our earliest documents is reasonably close to make such an enterprise intellectually respectable. What doesn't follow from the evidence are the well-known historical attempts to make Christianity into the universal basis for national belief and the foundation for considerable empire-building.
interesting apologetics
David L Wetzell, a truly interesting apologetics reply, trying to have one foot in each door is always filled with uncertainty and the chance you may split your dacks and reveal some unwanted reality. People who believe in god, no matter how they try to excuse and shy away from their guilt by association, always try desperately to distance themselves and their cult from the historic and present reality of their mythical delusions.
Isaac Newton did have a deep belief. He grew up and was programmed in a deeply religious family and studied to enter the church. He was convinced scientific investigation would lead to a greater knowledge of God whom he saw as the Creator of the universe. But he lived nearly 400 years ago and is a pathetic and primitive example to put forward for this day and age when science, cosmology, astrophysics, theoretical physics, verifiable history, archaeology, anthropology and chronological history shows us your Yahweh cult is just a primitive myth and its religious books false, plagiarised works of previous cultures from the distant past. There is but one god and that is the god of Abraham, the one god all factions or offshoots of the Yahweh cult follow, anything else is just an apologist’s empty excuse..
There are no differences between Christians, Muslims and Jews in how they approach and treat life, just the time scale. Consider the thousands of years of constant Christian Jewish and Muslim wars, one side takes the lead in debauchery the others condemn it, then they change places. It’s worse now as it encompasses the planet where in the past, it was localised. Just like politics, no difference – just the same pack of lies in different clothes.
It will be all of the USA which will implode and there will be little negative flow on effect, just the same as when the USSR collapsed and with probably the same results. However, the USA, because of its almost total reliance on its ego and faith in god, will suffer dramatically and will not be alone. Just like Rome, all other ideologies and suppressive regimes, they all come to an end when reality rolls over them.
It's irrelevant as to whether the USA would have been better under a different political regime, what is relevant is the future and the fact continuing with the current approach is fatal, just as your god has been fatal to billions of life forms and cultures on the planet as it has swept the planet with its despotic invasions and genocidal conversions.
What's really funny and primitively infantile is people still believe this god will come along and fix everything up for them and they will be forgiven for their greed, self centred gluttony and destroying the things their loving god supposedly created. Now that, to me, is primitive infantile stupidity and the main reason why religion has to use threats, destroy cultures, forcibly convert the people and as history shows us, kill them if they don't submit.
Make all the excuses and add all the illusionary hope you want, David, but facts are facts and reality is real, unlike your god, except within the primitive of mind.
The next hundred years will either be the end of god, or the end of humanity and life on earth. There is no room for both, as history and the current world situation show us.
By the way, the former carpenter you speak of didn't exist and if you and every other believer actually studied the verified, documented written and anthropological cultural history, you'd have to agree. But to support myth, you have rely upon myth and not fact.
John Pratt, cobber, the future is easy to predict, it's a consequence of the present. Until you change the present, the future will never change. The ideological human purposely forgets the past, so they can deny or excuse it.
Wall Street blast killed 39 people
How quickly we forget that 90 years ago Wall Street was a war zone.
No one knows who was behind this horrendous attack on the US financial centre. How many people even remember this tragic event? Trying to predict the future is hard when we do not even remember the past.
Apologies
Fiona: "Alga, the title of your comment was "The USA is uniform ideology". I published your comment this morning, and while I do from time to time amend comment titles (something to which Eliot could attest) I did not alter your title."
Thank you Fiona.
My apologies as I didn't even read the heading to my own post when answering Eliot.
Eliot, I aplogise for misjudging your comment, however except for dismissing my own post heading, I stand by most of what I posted and hope you will see, my post heading was done without thought to its semantic connotations. It happens when you havent been drilled into politically correct semantic linguistics, I thank you for pointing it out, but it was a good ramble anyway.
No, the USA is not a uniform ideology, but controlled by uniform ideology.
Uniform ideology
This I can agree with. Those who have been in control of the US have had a uniform ideology, while so many of the masses have had hardly much of a coherent ideology to speak of in the first place but rather have been quite vulnerable to the manipulations of those in control, not unlike with the sheep analogy used by a former carpenter a couple millenium ago.
Ideological smog
Goodness me Eliot, are you so ideologically uniform you fail to see what is written, so ideologically change someone else's words to suit your agenda? We see that eminently within the realms of the Yahweh cults. Their biblical works are a screaming example of barbarised words and meanings to give the illusion of fact.
The quote you ascribe to me doesn't appear anywhere in my post. Could you point out where I posted what you quote? It does change the meaning quite a lot, so you must have a reason for doing that. Could it be you are so uniform in your ideological approach you only see through the eyes of delusional hope? Or maybe your glasses aren't powerful enough to see though your ideological smog.
However, I do like a bit of humour, so to answer your question from a theoretical aspect. If the USA were a uniform ideology and not just controlled by uniform ideologies, then it could appear to be illogical to elect a black man. But then again, if it were a uniform ideology which claims to encompass all, then it is not unusual, unless you have deep seated racial and elitist principles. Something very common within the Yahweh cult and only recently starting to be excised from USA life.
Fiona: Alga, the title of your comment was "The USA is uniform ideology". I published your comment this morning, and while I do from time to time amend comment titles (something to which Eliot could attest) I did not alter your title.
Am enjoying a revisit
Am enjoying a revisit to this thread. The Wetzell/Alga debate is good stuff. But it is right to suggest that we may under/overestimate the system's probable capacity to absorb and adjust or reconstruct, for whose benefit we may not be sure ( the system itself?, as good or bad?) as we over or underestimate our capacities at personal adjustment.
The Obama discussion, for example, becomes apt if one questions whether the election of Obama is the elite's response to the last ten years, or the masses.
The system, if we can reduce the complexity of all human relationships to that, also operates on different levels, often involving a dichotomy that often will induce a dislocation between the local and the global, depending on viewpoint, as an overall holistic concept. We must investigate specific situations, of course, to build up evidence-based models that illuminate on the whole. But ignoring the forest for the trees is as counterproductive as vice versa, if we don't have an answer to a problem.
We could say Israel/Palestine is mainly about terrorism. The issue then becomes technical, as we look for ways of ending terrorism.
But if the above shows historical similarities to other historical situations, we can investigate the commonality of these similarities, to review our original assessment. We could say the Germans persecuted the European Jews the same (but worse) as the Jews (perhaps – sheesh, it’s just an example!) persecute the Palestinians.
But we can no longer say, without some thought, that Israel/Palestine, eg, is just and incontrovertibly about terrorism, eg, exclusively, for we have discovered that what some call "terrorism" could be equivalenced, depending on trajectory, with "resistance", as occurred during WW2 . Which we won and of course don't see as subversion of the master race and civilisation so much as the overthrow thru resistance of racist barbarism.
If we identify a trait of repression or conflict, a commonality, we can instead investigate what creates conflict and oppression involving different groups against "others", against a backdrop of many possible factors including either innate human nature (or/and) the warping of the individual by culturally developing history at a certain phase in that history. Wetzel's reply to Alga mentioning individuals’ cognitive "building blocks" as a basis for human and social appreciation of the past and present and capacity to anticipate the future is relevant here.
Then something like Israel/Palestine becomes more complex and we find we were in fact right to refer back to issues originally considered extraneous to the supposed issue as to definition, in this case resistance to the US/Israel axis exclusively as intrinsically, "terrorism" – a moral Manichean approach demanding exclusively the dealing with of delinquents (bombs or attrition?) rather than a dispassionate exploratory inquiry in to a phenomenon. For the dispassionate aspect has moved to dealing with those demonstrated beyond refutation as immoral, ie gas for Jews or cluster bombs or sanctions against Gazans.
Cause could have been confused for effect, tho. If the above issue is imagined as one of human relations and conflict, rather than merely a moral problem caused by Arab delinquents deserving of a good trouncing, we wonder belatedly at the origins of the conflict and necessarily go to history prior to 1948, when the Zionists announced they had unilaterally created, on the basis of a UN response itself skewed by vested interests.
Then the answer may involve less of cluster bombing of Arabs ( or suicide bombing of Israelis, if one in the end decides that the evidence sits with the Israelis) and more of a conciliatory approach involving identification, expression and resolution of legitimate concerns on both sides, rather than just one.
The USA is uniform ideology
David L Wetzell, interesting comments, but maybe a bit steeped in ideological hope and not reality. The religious wars between the varying factions of the Yahweh cult are far from their peak. Whilst Israel exists, the Yahweh wars will only get worse and continue to spread worldwide. I doubt the USA has been in a worse position internationally, socially or psychologically.
“So I'd say things will collapse even more so in the coming years, but we, in the US, never really built our system on a uniform ideology in the first place, although there are many in the US who've sadly been towed under by consumerism/hyperindividualism/nationalism.”
The USA is built on a very uniform ideology, God. There is no more dangerous or destructive uniform ideology on the planet, if you don't follow god in the USA you have no chance of entering politics to change things to a more positive direction and its the same in all god fuelled countries. Nationalism is also a uniform ideology, one which the USA fervently displays more than any other western country and even attempts to push it's nationality onto others in many ways. The USA is a purely ideological country, especially when you consider it sees those who deal in illusion, actors, preachers, the rich, as being exemplary figures of reality. Now if that's not brain dead uniform ideology, then what is?
One very strong scenario, which is probably not noticed by those within the USA's ideological control, is the USA will probably implode under the weight of ecological and sociological collapse. The next hundred years will see almost the complete opposite to what you envisage. Nature is the one who will determine our future. We lost that privilege when the people, not government, refused to make small changes to their lives 20-30 years ago.
The USA most definitely has serious problems, but...
Alga Kavanagh, can't say I agree that the Yahweh cult is behind the wars. I'd reckon that the fight-flight instinct in humanity or the manipulation of "immortal soul"-speak preceded the Constantinization of Christianity in 4th ctry CE, as also did the existence of imperialism and before that the short and brutish nature of human existence. I'd also reckon that the inferences of that Yahweh-cult member Isaac Newton, motivated as he was to persuade other intellectuals to also believe in God, regarding the principles of physics and the method of calculus went a long ways to making our wars far more deadly, to say nothing of the technical efficiency of genocide. And I'm also not feeling any real belief system besides greed is good behind the US's regime change of Mossadegh in '53, but maybe you mean the God the US trusts to get behind its currency? That sounds just like the God who "elected" the nation of Israel, apart from its merits, to be a light to all other nations....
So please, it may be fashionable downunder to sloppily blame other's non-reality-based ideologies for the woes of the world, but inasmuch as we all rely on belief systems to make our ways thru this ever-changing conflict-ridden world, it pays to be a bit more specific about what one is critiquing. I, for one, happen to believe that an anthropocentric monotheism rooted in the margins of empire with the intent of uplifting humanity is the best possible belief system, while a triumphant universal monotheism at the helm of empire is the worst possible system. Oh, and Xty was the first way before it became far more like the latter....
Anyhoo,....
I'm afraid that many in the US lack the breadth to appreciate atheism, albeit it seems a bit unfair to presume that there is uniformity of understandings of God among folks. And just because folks say they believe in God doesn't mean they've bothered to try and workout what that means for their lives.
I'd argue that with Many muslim countries, it's not so much a belief in God, but the nature of that belief and its traditions that apparently don't seem to make one a better person, but rather simply more open to manipulation by those who claim to speak for God.
So I'd imagine we probably agree a bit on the distrust towards most leaders of organized religion, and I consider myself as more into "not-so-organized" religion. And yet, much that we also would probably agree is wrong has been propagated by irreligious folks as well.
In my opinion, the sorts of beliefs and practices that abetted the US's rise to power in the past century proved hard to sustain and/or easy to subvert. The fault is not with the lack of use of reason, but rather the intrinsic difficulty of not lapsing into complacency when things seem to be going well and the difficulty of keeping in one's mind the corrupting nature of power, regardless of the creed or belief system of those in power.
I agree that many belief systems (and some denominations in the US) will implode in the near future (I'm guessing some may simply split and then merge, with a fair amount of ugliness but hopefully not too much violence) and some will get resurrected. This doesn't bother me so much, as traditional USAmerican Christianity has long been disfigured in significant ways and its bifurcation early in this past century between modernists and fundamentalists (who were both wrong in important respects) probably contributed a good deal to the US's decline, with significant spillover effects on the rest of the world due to it's geopolitical influence.
But honestly, I'm not quite sure I buy that things'd be a lot better if the levers of power had been allocated differently over here. It's pretty much the hope for an option C emerging from much deliberation and dialogue that keep me going and that option C includes changes in habits/rules so that the influence of $peech on our two dominant national parties is ably checked by a host of 500 plus decentralized local third parties, contesting local elections and otherwise practising the politics of Gandhi.
The USA is uniform ideology
Alga, well said!
I agree they seem to have adopted many self-centred fascist inculcations, including an undefined "God", but there also seems to be a developing trend to destroy certain US "strengths", in the sense of obstacles to accepting that they are part of the world and must be more responsible. The symbols are all used to capture the weak of thought.
Pledging allegiance, whatever that is, to a flag? What about praising reason? Diversity? Accepting responsibility for management of the environment? These are being addressed by the Greenies and civil rights actions over the past generations. The bubble is being tweaked to damage one or the other of these opposed movements. There is some danger of collapse: the water situation is dire there. There has been over development of the American Dream also. These things will tend to rectify with President Obama.
The worst thing that could happen would be that they decide to engage in serious wars, as opposed to the Terror thingy. That will be very interesting.
Google is not Chinese. Rock and roll is not from Iran.
What in blazes is a "self-centred fascist inculcations"? Apart from being "God' as you say?
What I find particularly striking about the USA is the extraordinary cultural, political and social diversity of the place.
You mention environmentalism, for example. Modern environmentalism was virtually invented in the USA.
In fact, as historian Arthur Marwick points out in his book The Sixties, nearly all the major social and poltical movements of the sixties, which continue to echo in our own time, including the contemporary women's movement, the mass protest peace movement, the modern civil rights movement, gay rights movement and others developed initially in the USA.
Virtually all started in the USA. Everything from urban environmentalism through to rock and roll to comic books to Black Power.
There has probably been no greater engine for cultural and political diversity in the last 20 years than the information revolution, for example
Google is not Chinese. Rock and roll is not Iranian. Radical feminism in not Cuban.
Such things could only come from the USA.
Nowhere else.
The USA is uniform ideology?
Alga: "The USA is uniform ideology"
Is this why they voted for Barack Obama? Or is it why Noam Chomsky is their most widely quoted philosopher and Michael Moore got an Academy Award?
some thoughts...
I agree with Friedman in discounting the Islamic threat, because I think it's fair to say that it's been at its worse in places and times when there was substantial turmoil or in foreign locations that have been hostile to Islamic culture/religious belief. As such, I think it's going to be a source of internal turmoil in "old" Europe, reinforcing Friedman's predictions that they will continue to be reduced as global players. Otherwise, there are too much internal divisions among Islam and the ample evidence of the personal shortcomings of revivalists and the difficulties of publicly enforcing their stringent codes of behavior tend to make them lapse into a more complacent status.
As for the Peak Oil problem, the current economic crisis gives us an opening when we may see a mix of soft and hard power used to mitigate the severity of the concentrations of ownership of oil and/or gas. I'm thinking that if the US, in particular, started combining taxes on nonrenewables with income transfers, like the Alaskan Permanent Fund, that this will take a bite out of over-consumption and the "oil wars".
The US is in a tough spot, but we've been in worse ... and we have been undergoing changes since the Cold War ended already, although the tragic internal (religious and regionally-based) cultural wars and the break-down of organized labor and our post-911 hypersensitivity to terrorism have held them back. We are seeing many progressive activists and community-based movements that are, in fact, overturning the cold-war mentality in the US.
So change is inevitable, but it is not clear what sorts of changes will prevail. I, for one, think that the Red Queen effect implicit in Friedman's work could be mitigated if the US performed its "Global Sheriff" role better via a more comprehensive set of checks-and-balances that could emerge relatively easily if we incorporated the use of proportional representation in local elections in such a way that it became harder for one (of the two main national) party(ies) to dominate our political system at the state and national levels and it enabled the proliferation of 500+ decentralized local third parties committed to the use of the "politics of Gandhi" that value influencing policy changes more so than getting and keeping their people into power.
The political-economy of war is pretty simple: the few benefit concretely at the expense of the many, and so when there's more uncertainty as to which elites are in power and non-elites can be relatively easily heard by elites, it stands to reason that the US could hold its role as a Global Sheriff without provoking so much in arms-races with regional powers, as has tended to be the case in the previous centuries.
Fiona: Welcome to Webdiary, David, and thank you for your thoughtful observations.
Thanks but no thanks
Fiona: "Alga, would you like to read the book and review it for Webdiary?"
Thanks Fiona, but I doubt I could get through it after reading a few portions.
An open offer?
Fiona, is that offer open to anyone?
Sounds like an interesting read - flick it my way and you can even have it back - no additional postage required - signed the Son of A Librarian!
Fiona: I might be able to arrange it, David, though it may take a week or so. Email your postal address.
Reinventing Collapse
Dmitry Orlov says that the US should be looking to its old enemy - the Soviet Union for lessons on how to deal with the global financial crisis. He says the coming upheaval presents a plethora of opportunities for reinvention - if it's handled right
I listened to an interesting interview of Dmitry Orlov on Latenight Live. He has a very different view of the next 100 years. He is author of Reinventing Collapse:
Dmitry see similarities between the collapse of the Soviet Union and the soon to collapse United States. I think anyone who surmises that the US will be around in a recognisable state in fifty years time has not got a grip on reality. Anyone that looks at the world in one hundred years time must take into account the catastrophic effects of climate change. Of one thing I am sure - the next one hundred years will be a very turbulent time and the outcome completely unpredictable.
Fiona: I agree, John, it was a fascinating interview - I wish LNL did transcripts.
hmmm...
I visited Ukraine, in the summer of 2005, after their Orange Revolution and have continued to follow their situation via a variety of blogs, like "Foreign Notes" or Ukrainiania. I interviewed a number of Ukrainians about the fall of the Soviet Union and the fall of its ideological mentality.
I'd like to say that since then I've been able to see how the cold war ideological mentality in the US, which was not strong enough to prevent a large amount of important innovations or to squelch the civil rights movements(and their after-effects), has been deteriorating since the 80s.
So I'd say things will collapse even more so in the coming years, but we, in the US, never really built our system on a uniform ideology in the first place, although there are many in the US who've sadly been towed under by consumerism/hyperindividualism/nationalism. So I'd argue at least that it's an open question of what the coming years will entail and that I'd reckon Russia neo-Soviet nationalism would probably fall apart before the US's interlocking and cross-fertilizing subcultures truly collapse.
As for the economic crisis, right now, it pays to focus more on tending one's own garden than idle speculation on the big picture. The current incarnation of the Republican Party is, in fact, falling apart. I anticipate a melt-down that will precipitate a split in the Democratic party, so that the US has two national parties with more common ground and civility, such that neither has any illusions of gaining a permanent majority, and there is a host of 500 plus decentralized local third parties that will serve to increase voter turnout/understandings and contest local elections and otherwise vote together strategically so as to help make the center that the main two parties center themselves around more dynamic/responsive to more people on more issues.
Pie in the sky
I've not read the book, but had a discussion and a bit of a look at it yesterday with a friend who works at UTAS and lectures on intelligence and security. His opinion is the same as mine, Friedman states that he believes many of his predictions won't happen as things will change because of local events and he does seem to have missed the current economic collapse. His support for a 100 year USA empire is fanciful and I don't see how Japan without any resources could wage war against the USA, without having large stockpiles of resources.
He forgets to take into account diminishing oil and what will happen to the war machines when oil is extremely scarce, he says nothing in what I read of environmental factors and their effects.
He also believes the Islamic/ USA war is almost over and the Taliban is finished, yet the facts seem to indicate they are becoming stronger in Afghanistan, Iran and Pakistan. If the Taliban were nearly broken, how come the USA is sending more troops and demanding we and others increase their troop numbers. He also believes the USA rules the waves and will continue to do so because of them having shores on both major oceans, yet if you look at the facts you may see the USA only has control over very small areas.
Nor does he take into account the rising Islamic population and its spread, plus the fact that for the USA to retain its power base, requires it to control, or have the cooperation of individual countries. As it stands, the USA is not the flavour of the month anywhere and is continuing to put people and countries off side with their aggressive and predatory actions. All USA natural resources are declining rapidly, as is its ecology. So probably he is wrong on most accounts and his book would only really appeal to the ideologically inclined, who rely upon pie in the sky outcomes from airy fairy illusionist futures.
Although his belief in a new cold war with Russia could well be true, but he may be a bit off in his timing as it may happen in the next year or so and not in the 20's.
Fiona: Alga, would you like to read the book and review it for Webdiary?
rip van winkle?
Fiona Reynolds, "we" indeed are living now in "interesting times". Stunning yesterday to read that 40% of the estimated global wealth of a year ago is now so much hot air, for example.
That news story itself so sums it up as to the times - it's all so much more contingent, all of a sudden. Let's hope your judgement is good, in proposing that folk should read the book, a brief review cannot of itself do justice to an individual's account of the whys and wherefores from this historical moment of future shock, defined and complicated by the notion of "flux".
Crystal balling itself is becoming complex because we do seem to be at a stage of epochal change and a new lens reveals much that may have been seen as "current" even a week ago, consigned already to a secondary role as mere historical context to an unexpected "now", similar to times like 1914, 1929, the end of WW2 or the fall of the Berlin Wall.
I.e, we must now increasingly factor the future against new and as yet imperfectly factored science involving ecology and climate change.
But you've anticipated this in your dot point summary [Fiona: too kind, Paul, but it was the publisher's summary] - the desperate struggles in West Asia specifically in Pakistan and Afghanistan at this stage could provide a result that prefigures the history of the rest of this century, for example.
Turkey and Iran further complicate the view and from there the role and future of Western Europe, China, India, Latin America and Russia and East Asia. All this itself made random by prospects of sudden emergence of decisive new technologies and there’s always the chance of a major geographical disaster throwing things out of whack.
The US attempt to seize the global initiative post Berlin Wall has appeared to fail, but time will tell. In the meantime, at a hunch, the scenario of a protracted and Byzantine global chess game involving many players does indeed seem most likely.
Fiona: Paul, if I can get a copy to you, would you be interested in reviewing it for Webdiary?