06.14.10
Posted in globalization at 12:15 pm by nemo
Peregrinations in the world of faith
Syed Badrul Ahsan reflects on wars and skirmishes waged in God’s name
Armstrong is a very poor guide to world religion!
We are talking about a progression in the Axial Age, perhaps: Israelitism gives birth to jihad, which begins to exteriorize in Christianity, exploding in Islam as jihad. The issue was globalization via religion.
Note that the critique of religion as ‘violent’ by the New Atheists should be fair enough to compare not just religion and non-religion, but all forms of globalization. The process of gloabalization via religion seemed like a good idea at the time. Now they do the honors of jihad via economic bullshit handed down by Adam Smith.
Armstrong gets away with sugar doses to her public, viz. the idea that there was hardly a jihad in Islam.
Permalink
01.08.10
Posted in globalization, The Eonic Effect at 2:53 pm by nemo
An Eonic Sequence, And A Frequency Deduction
One of the hidden dangers of Darwinian thinking is its concealed influence on the process of economic interaction, and, finally, the process of globalization, so-called.
But real globalization as seen in the eonic sequence is something different.
(Eonic) globalization It is important to distinguish our sense of globalization from the current ‘economic globalization’ that we see in our current modern context. Globalization in our sense is the action of the eonic sequence, as it generates a global set of transitional zones in cultural transformations at the highest level of culture (macro-action). Economic, or other, diffusionist globalization has a different, too often, savage character, and too often degenerates rapidly, becoming counterproductive implosive mayhem (micro-action).
Permalink
01.07.10
Posted in globalization, History, The Eonic Effect at 7:52 pm by nemo
RG Mail
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/ac26eb9a-f30a-11de-a888-00144feab49a,dwp_uuid=9c33700c-4c86-11da-89df-0000779e2340.html?ftcamp=rss
Financial Times
December 27 2009
*The decade the world tilted east
*We are living through the end of 500 years of western ascendancy
By Niall Ferguson
I am trying to remember now where it was, and when it was, that it hit me.
Was it during my first walk along the Bund in Shanghai in 2005? Was it amid
the smog and dust of Chonqing, listening to a local Communist party official
describe a vast mound of rubble as the future financial centre of south-west
China? That was last year, and somehow it impressed me more than all the
synchronised razzamatazz of the Olympic opening ceremony in Beijing. Or was
it at Carnegie Hall only last month, as I sat mesmerised by the music of
Angel Lam, the dazzlingly gifted young Chinese composer who personifies the
Orientalisation of classical music? I think maybe it was only then that I
really got the point about this decade, just as it was drawing to a close:
that we are living through the end of 500 years of western ascendancy.
“Western Ascendancy”: that was the grandiose title of the course I taught at
Harvard this past term. The subtitle was even more bombastic: “Mainsprings
of Global Power”. The question I wanted to pose was not especially original,
but increasingly it seems to be the most interesting question a historian of
the modern era can address. Just why, beginning in around 1500, did the less
populous and apparently backward west of the Eurasian landmass come to
dominate the rest of the world, including the more populous and more
sophisticated societies of eastern Eurasia?
My subsidiary question was this: If we can come up with a good explanation
for the west’s past ascendancy, can we then offer a prognosis for its
future?
Students of the eonic effect can address these questions of Niall Ferguson immediately: we see the exact timing of the modern transition in the eonic effect, and two centuries after The Great Divide the system begins to shift its center of gravity, toward a global oikoumene, a process underway since the end of that transition, in fact.
The critical two hundred period after the Divide threatens to show a deviation from the mainline momentume, something all too visible in the past decade of the US, ominous, and unnerving.
It is not about titling east, or about the ‘empire’ of America, or even about economics. The issue is the creation of a genuine oikoumene of world peoples beyond the narrow sourcing area of the ‘eonic transition’ we call the passage to ‘modernity’.
Permalink
10.30.09
Posted in globalization at 12:24 pm by nemo
The Cosmopolitan Tongue: The Universality of English
John McWhorter
In depicting the emergence of the world’s languages as a curse of gibberish, the biblical tale of the Tower of Babel makes us moderns smile. Yet, considering the headache that 6,000 languages can induce in real life, the story makes a certain sense.
Permalink
10.28.09
Posted in globalization at 12:23 pm by nemo
Globalization: Diseases Spreading From Humans To Animals, Study Finds
ScienceDaily (Oct. 28, 2009) — Globalisation and industrialisation are causing diseases to spread from humans to animals
Permalink
08.22.09
Posted in Evolution, globalization, New Age, Science & Religion at 12:09 pm by nemo
Self, Meditating
By Robert Wright
In the midst of the debate over history, evolution and religion, we are now treated to Mr. Wright’s explorations in Buddhism.
I am having a problem here, not dissimilar to the problem we had with Sam Harris.
And this is the hypocrisy of promoting Darwinian scientism and reductionism, and the informing us that the author has a New Age hobby.
It is possible that these two are simply confused, and/or navigate toward Buddhism because they find some resonance with science.
Whatever the case, Darwinism and Buddhism are totally incapatible, and it would be simple courtesy to stop trying to get away with these finessed contradictions at the expense of readers, and in many cases very naive readers, who are being harmed by the Darwin paradigm.
We should consider then that Wright is either confused beyond recovery, a hypocrite trying to sell the Darwin paradigm even as he dabbles in Buddhism, or else a human mess about to have a nervous breakdown as his Darwin career collides with the svengali Buddhist ghosts who are obviously trying to undermine him.
Permalink
07.20.09
Posted in globalization, History, Islam, secularism, The Axial Age, The Eonic Effect at 4:48 pm by nemo
History, and histories, of Islam
The problem with many of these critics of Islam, such as Spencer, mentioned in one of the comments, is that they drift into a right-wing perspective and then become proponents of ‘Western Civilization’ (whatever that is) and defenders of Christian traditionalism and religion against Islam, the status of secularism remaining confused.
The issue in criticizing Islam is not the Western tradition or some debate between Christianity and Islam.
The issue is the emergence of a new secular modernity, potentially global, in a ‘European context or matrix’, proceeding swiftly toward a transcultural context or matrix’. The emergence of modern freedoms is the great moment of this modern transition.
Muslims give themselves away as lacking in historical comprehension in their rejection of this aspect of modernity.
For Europeans bemused by a spurious latecomer consisting of postmodern multiculturalism and the rest of it to throw away their emergent heritage for an Islamic restoration of reactionary premodern culture is almost beyond belief, incomprehensible.
It is the emergence of modern secular culture in a Western source area, not Western Civilization, that is important. The reflexive focus on the West confuses the whole critique of the retrograde Islam, now most tragically threatening to overtake Europe.
Conservatives making a fetish out of the ‘West’ and Christianity are part of the problem and are inhibiting secular liberals from taking up the critique of Islam. Here the radical left with its idiotic alliance with Islamic culture has missed the point and is threatening to precipitate still another cultural tragedy, sharia in Holland. That is simply beyond belief. And no part of the legacy of Karl Marx, for crying out loud.
I recommend a careful look and study of the eonic effect to see the way in which emergent civilization transcends its source areas, and the dilemma that Muslims must face, with respect to the relatively weak basis for a world culture in Islam.
I don’t wish to be unfair to Islam, whose study I find of great interest, and in fact it is not unfair. Islam has exactly the potential that emerged with Protestantism from Catholicism to be a secular religious matrix in the context of modernization. In fact, it might be too fair to hope for such an outcome in what seems a religious culture stuck in the past. The same was said of Catholicism (now a variant of Protestantism).
Westerners, so-called, need to grasp the reality of their situation, which cannot be Christian culture vs Islamic culture. It can only be globalizing secular culture, born in the ‘west’, but rapidly globalizing on the way to a new oikoumene of secular entities.
For Europe to succumb to a retrograde phase of Islamic restoration is a recipe for total catastrophe, and it is irresponsible for any secularist to contemplate such an outcome. The radical left now abetting such an eventuality is in the midst of still another screw up, in the long list of many since the nineteenth century.
The eonic effect is a good guide to the larger dynamics of religions in world history.
Islam and Christianity/Judaism, for all their claims to spiritual foundations are in fact medieval distortions in all cases. The true moment in the Axial Age of the Greek, Israelite, Indic, Sinic (et al) intervals of transformation are lost to us now, and none of the world religions that find their sources in that era have any real connection to those periods, least wise any claim of ‘revelation’.
We should note that Axial Age Greece gave birth to secularism, and much else, and the modern transformation echoes much of that.
Thus the rise of modern secularism has a far better claim for a spiritual foundation than the medieval distortions of Christianity and Islam. Strange to say, but the facts of history in the large show the reality.
We tend to think of ‘Western Civilization’ in terms of Judaic, and Greek, sources, but that isn’t European! So why the exclusive focus on Europe. It is confusing the issue.
Look at the facts of the case with Islam: it is a most remarkable cultural matrix, but its basis is not adequate for a future global culture. This reality has to be faced, as the sentimental distortions of culture and history are set aside for a more realistic appraisal of Islamic history in light of the facts.
Christians and Moslems are full of themselves as they flaunt some special relationship to the sacred or to god. Such claims are without merit and are blinding millions to their real needs.
One of the problems is that secularism is misunderstood by its proponents, as scientism, darwinism, atheism, and a host of lesser episodes of modernity rise to claim the whole. The real significance of the secular has yet to manifest itself, and remains a project of the future.
Permalink
07.10.09
Posted in globalization at 12:07 pm by nemo
http://www.democracynow.org/2009/6/29/ecuadoran_president_rafael_correa_on_global
Democracy Now! June 29, 2009
Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa on Global Capitalism
Why He Won’t Renew the US Base in Manta, Chevron in the Amazon, Obama’s War in Afghanistan, and More
Permalink
07.07.09
Posted in globalization, The Eonic Effect at 5:35 pm by nemo
Think Again: Asia’s Rise
Don’t believe the hype about the decline of America and the dawn of a new Asian age. It will be many decades before China, India, and the rest of the region take over the world, if they ever do.
The point is being missed here that we are dealing with a succession of empires, but of the globalization, in the true sense of that word, of the ‘modern transition’, in the terminology of the eonic effect.
Those who wish to compete with America sould study that data, to see that the realization of freedom and democracy is the crucial thing to imitate, not the imperial degeneration of the USA
Permalink
04.01.09
Posted in globalization at 1:34 pm by nemo
Published on Wednesday, April 1, 2009 by Times Online/UK
Let’s Shake Off the Shackles of Free Trade
The G20 leaders must be flexible – a little protectionism could give nations vital breathing space
by Noreena Hertz
Today the leaders of the world’s 20 biggest economic powerhouses will converge on London. The mood is sombre. They face the greatest global economic crisis yet. They acknowledge that it was man-made: the outcome of extreme risk-taking, shameful lack of oversight and a complacent blindness to the downside of untrammelled free-market economics. They are nervously conscious that decisions must be made without reference to the very tools and theories on which they have relied for the past 30 years.
Permalink
03.27.09
Posted in Critique of Evolutionary Economy, globalization at 1:13 pm by nemo
Published on Friday, March 27, 2009 by Financial Times
Number of Chronically Hungry Tops 1 Billion
by Javier Blas
LONDON – The number of chronically hungry people has surpassed the 1bn mark for the first time as the economic crisis compounds the impact of high food prices, the United Nations’ top agriculture official has warned.
Permalink
03.25.09
Posted in globalization at 12:15 pm by nemo
Global Capitalism: The Suicide Version
Posted on Mar 24, 2009
By William Pfaff
The globalization of the international economy launched by the United States as an accidental policy of the Clinton administration has since been much lauded as benefiting (some of) the poor of the world by drawing them into the international capitalist system. This is not actually what it was designed to do.
It has proved, like the god Janus, to have two aspects. The second face now has been revealed. Economic globalization has, as its second result, impoverished (some of) the rich of the world.
The free market originated in 19th century Britain in what is called by historians the Great Transformation. As the English political philosopher John Gray describes it in “False Dawn,” a prophetic book (in 1998) on the destructive effects of globalization, that transformation tore from their local roots the economic markets that since medieval times and before had been tied to communities, and had evolved through the needs and adaptations of those communities and their immediate neighbors.
Permalink
03.21.09
Posted in globalization at 12:35 pm by nemo
Published on Saturday, March 21, 2009 by Independent/UK
G20 Protesters ‘Will Try to Bring London to Standstill’
Police fear anti-capitalist groups will seek violent confrontation on streets
by By Mark Hughes and Jerome Taylor
LONDON — Next month’s G20 summit will present an “unprecedented” challenge as up to 2,000 protesters attempt to bring London to a standstill, the Metropolitan Police admitted yesterday.
Permalink
02.27.09
Posted in globalization at 2:53 pm by nemo
Nation’s Food System Nearly Broke
by John Kinsman
As our government enacts a stimulus package and President Barack Obama announces bold initiatives to stem home mortgage foreclosures, disaster threatens family farmers and their communities.
Read the rest of this entry »
Permalink
02.26.09
Posted in globalization at 3:55 pm by nemo
Published on Thursday, February 26, 2009 by the Guardian/UK
Greenwash: Why ‘Clean Coal’ is the Ultimate Climate Change Oxymoron
The people who told us for years that climate change was a myth now say it’s all true – but something called ‘clean coal’ can fix it. This is pure and utter greenwash.
by Fred Pearce
Next week, Americans are being invited to take part in what could become the largest act of civil disobedience against global warming in the country’s history. People are protesting at the coal-fired power plant that powers legislators on Capitol Hill in Washington DC.
No clean-coal plant that buries carbon has yet been built. Photograph: Robert Nickelsberg/Getty ImagesCynics may say it’s about time Americans joined the action. The fact is that too many Americans have been bamboozled for too long by a campaign of disinformation about the science of climate change. Many still think the whole question of mankind’s role in global warming is disputed in scientific circles (I expect the comments beneath this blog will soon demonstrate this point).
Permalink
11.24.08
Posted in globalization at 2:10 pm by nemo
Bailouts Dwarf Spending on Climate and Poverty Crises
by Sarah Anderson and John Cavanagh
Read the rest of this entry »
Permalink
11.11.08
Posted in Evolution, globalization, Philosophy at 5:55 pm by nemo
CONSIDER THIS
Public Intellectual 2.0
The lament for ‘public intellectuals’ is misplaced. It is a genus that apparently has not yet come into eixstence. What is a public intellectual? Of those who claim the mantle where are those who can see through the reign of the Darwin propaganda machine? All we get is Mr. Hitchens, public intellectual and Dawkins groupie.
In a confusion of the left, and such biologists as S.J. Gould who subtly abdicated the critique of the theory he knew was flawed, the sphere of public discourse has been taken over by the subtitute for a public philosophy seen in the New Atheists and figures such as Dawkins. This is not some plea for theism, merely a wondering sense that atheism has discredited itself as a botched cult movement. Where, or what, is the real thing? Or perhaps the way is beyond theism or atheism.
What is needed, and what might properly be the realm of a public intellectual, is the complex terrain of public philosophy between the sciences and the humanities, and the deeper meaning of what that indicates for a secular age. C.P. Snow was right, the ‘humanities’ need science. But he failed to indicate that the scientists are in desperate need of a meta-scientific perspective, and a larger cultural dimension from the current prostrate embrace of rank scientism.
That is, a realization of the failure, or inability, of science (or religion) to define the ideological ground of modernism in a techocratic age.
And there is a larger dimension of world religion as this intersects with the discourse of public philosophy, not a simple question, for the heritage of Feuerbach. What is the fate of Buddhism, as we recall this blog discussing Hitchens drunk at the entrance to an Indian ashram? The last elected public intellectual, btw, was a Turkish sufi, if anyone recalls the amusing swamping of the vote by his fans. The scope of discourse has expanded beyond reasonable limits, to include the mysteries of an unstable mix of cultural history. Redefining secularism in that context is not a simple task.
Such a complex trajectory can hardly expect success if such a simple issue as the failure of Darwinism remains unacchievable.
A good starting point for the public intellectuals. Start with something simple, a paradigm shift beyond Darwinism. It doesn’t even require a Marxist slant (except to de-darwinize the ‘left’), or a scheme to plot against the government.
Just some public intellectual 2.0 mentations, in public.
Read the rest of this entry »
Permalink
10.14.08
Posted in globalization at 7:15 pm by nemo
Extended comment on globalization, of interest, whether or not I agree.
Permalink