The Institute for Cultural Evolution (ICE) and its co-founder Steve McIntosh have just released a new white paper entitled “Fostering Evolution in Islamic Culture,” and have requested comments.
The purpose of the paper is to propose a method for Western societies to address the challenge the “difficult and dire problem” of “the ongoing rise of radical Islamism” we have been witnessing since the end of the Cold War. The underlying assumption of the paper derives from ICE’s “aim to create significant forward movement in the evolution of the American political landscape, and apply this new ‘evolutionary’ perspective to the developmental challenges of a complex, globalizing world.” ICE believes that it is possible to “positively influence the evolution of American culture in realistic and measurable ways” by “applying groundbreaking insights taken from Integral philosophy, developmental psychology, evolutionary theory, and the social sciences to help create significant forward movement in the evolution of the American cultural and political landscape.”
Now, apparently, not content with this demanding undertaking, we are invited to apply this same thinking to “Muslim culture” as the beginning of a remedy to the problem of radical Islamism.
I truly love and appreciate these efforts to uncover what, if anything, can be done to consciously expand consciousness on a mass basis. Having studied this for some time, my own conclusion is “not at this time,” but what do I know?
Still, I find many flaws in the ICE proposition and its analyses, and this particular paper has its share. Perhaps its author might be willing to consider them.
Where to begin?
The paper makes regular reference to “traditional Islamic culture” as if that is a uniform system encompassing the 1.6 billion Muslims around the world. But this is, at best, a misnomer, for many distinct cultures with their own peculiar history, political economy, and customs embrace Islam, from Arabic, Turkish, Egyptian, and Persian to Kazakh, Afghani, Punjabi, Indonesian, and many others. While they all have Islam in common, they also are all centered in amber consciousness, which, as I will point out, is the actual issue.
Showing posts with label al-Qaeda. Show all posts
Showing posts with label al-Qaeda. Show all posts
Wednesday, March 25, 2015
Thursday, February 3, 2011
Egypt and the Global Financial Crises
Much hubbub about the amazing turbulence in Egypt; especially in the wake of the popular uprising in Tunisia that deposed Ben Ali, I wonder if the “Arab street” in Egypt is finally awakening to the tremors deliberately set off when the United States forcibly deposed Saddam Hussein in 2003.
Remember that the rarely-voiced strategic approach by the Bush Administration and its allies to addressing Islamist terror and its generators was to begin to undermine the autocratic regimes across the region against whose tyranny groups like the Muslim Brotherhood, al-Qaeda, and others were primarily agitating. The invasion of Iraq was not an end, but the necessary intervention to get the whole chain reaction moving. Iraq, located in the center of both the Arab geography and the Sunni-Shi’a split, was always the linchpin—as Saddam and his neighbors knew before Osama bin Laden’s attacks forced the U. S. to change its strategic relationship with the area.
Let’s see if we can’t link the financial turbulence to what’s happening in the Middle East today—see if we can’t find the place of integration of what may not seem linked intuitively.
The primary impetus driving world evolution today is the transcendence of the Orange Industrial Era by the rise of the Green Information Age. (There’s a whole lot to say about how the Information Age itself was created by what the transformations of the Industrial Era gave rise to with the emergence of what we know today as science. The severing of the “objective” and “subjective” worlds, or the granting empirical inquiry the same dignity as religious seeking, inspired an explosion of knowledge about the physical world that emphatically includes the triumphs of Albert Einstein and his quantum physicist colleagues. It was their discoveries that made possible the technology undergirding the Information Age.)
Since we are, relatively speaking (as far as we can hypothesize), at the beginning of this new age, there is a lot about it that we cannot yet say with any certainty. From an Integral Model perspective, we would say that the Kosmic habit being created by true Green is still plastic and variable, so while we can make useful comments about its contours, we must hold these rather lightly.
Remember that the rarely-voiced strategic approach by the Bush Administration and its allies to addressing Islamist terror and its generators was to begin to undermine the autocratic regimes across the region against whose tyranny groups like the Muslim Brotherhood, al-Qaeda, and others were primarily agitating. The invasion of Iraq was not an end, but the necessary intervention to get the whole chain reaction moving. Iraq, located in the center of both the Arab geography and the Sunni-Shi’a split, was always the linchpin—as Saddam and his neighbors knew before Osama bin Laden’s attacks forced the U. S. to change its strategic relationship with the area.
Let’s see if we can’t link the financial turbulence to what’s happening in the Middle East today—see if we can’t find the place of integration of what may not seem linked intuitively.
The primary impetus driving world evolution today is the transcendence of the Orange Industrial Era by the rise of the Green Information Age. (There’s a whole lot to say about how the Information Age itself was created by what the transformations of the Industrial Era gave rise to with the emergence of what we know today as science. The severing of the “objective” and “subjective” worlds, or the granting empirical inquiry the same dignity as religious seeking, inspired an explosion of knowledge about the physical world that emphatically includes the triumphs of Albert Einstein and his quantum physicist colleagues. It was their discoveries that made possible the technology undergirding the Information Age.)
Since we are, relatively speaking (as far as we can hypothesize), at the beginning of this new age, there is a lot about it that we cannot yet say with any certainty. From an Integral Model perspective, we would say that the Kosmic habit being created by true Green is still plastic and variable, so while we can make useful comments about its contours, we must hold these rather lightly.
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