From: Grant Callaghan (grantc4@hotmail.com)
Date: Tue 19 Nov 2002 - 16:33:29 GMT
An article I read about a year ago by a businessman who was selling to the
global economy said that the greatest problem he had today was the pace of
change. The world is changing so quickly that he couldn't use methods he
learned at Harvard Business School to solve his business problems. They
were obsolete before he graduated.
I don't know how many of you have heard about Ray Kurzweil and his theory of
the singularity, which he expounds upon in his book, Spiritual Machines, but
in it he shows that the world is changing through technology at an
exponential rate. Technologies capable of changing the paradigms of our
existence are being released at an ever-increasing speed. At some time in
the near future (he figures between 2020 and 2030) the computer will become
smarter than humans and will start designing new machines that are beyond
our understanding.
The same pace of change is taking place in the fields of biology, genomics,
physics, economics and every other field that is affected by the use of
computers. This, to my mind, is the root cause of the clash of cultures.
We are moving into the future at something approaching the speed of light
and a lot of people in the world don't want to go with us. Change scares
people. They can't or don't want to cope with it. It takes a lifetime just
to adjust to the world we already know, and it looks like the planet is
spinning out of control.
In just a couple of decades, the crops we harvest have been changed
genetically in countries all over the world. Nearly 75% of the soybeans
grown in the world are GM products. China is training over 200,000
biologists to try and catch up with the West in this field. The country
that is trying to become part of the new world doesn't have time to fight
long drawn-out wars with its neighbors nor to sit around and let the
infrastructure go to hell and its citizens remain ignorant. As the Red
Queen said to Alice, it will take all the running they can do just to stay
even.
That, to my mind, is the main reason some people are trying to stop the
world from running away from them. The 14th century seems like something
they can understand and live with. The 21st century doesn't. There's more
to Macdonalds and Wallmart than just hamburgers and french fries. It is a
way of controlling the market and driving the little guy out of it. It is a
technology that is more efficient than the old mom and pop way of doing
things. Cows slaughtered in Chicago end up in hamburgers in Beijing a month
or less later. The golden arches use so much beef they can control prices
all over the world. I think this is the kind of domination the more
backward and slower moving countries resent.
I saw a show the other week on an African country trying to stave off
starvation by growing chocolate for the market in Europe. People were
processing the beans for chocolate with a wooden pestle in a hollowed out
tree stump. What they didn't realize is that no matter how much more they
get for their product, it won't be able to compete with modern production
and marketing methods. Someone in another country will find a more
efficient way to do it and the Africans will continue to starve.
This is the kind of domination that is scaring the hell out of the third
world and the people being left behind by it. They see it as a religious
issue, but that's just a small part of it. It's the way we in the west are
changing the world and the rate at which we are changing it for a people who
want to keep it the same -- like something they have grown accustomed to and
feel like they can cope with.
Customs that are based on the way the world was 500 or 1,000 years ago don't
serve us well today. Genetically modified foods must be driving many of
them crazy. Where in the Koran and Kosherdom to they fit in? Before the
spiritual leaders of the world can make decisions about what is and is not
kosher, the world is covered in crops that never existed before. Rice now
has vitamin A, fish are being farmed and changed genetically to grow bigger
and faster, corn contains its own insecticide and cattle can contain the
genes of pigs. How can an old-world person know what they are putting in
their bodies and how can they reconcile the new world with their religious
beliefs?
The short answer is that they can't. So they feel the new world is being
forced on them against their will and the U.S. is the primary force driving
the changes they can't accept. The people being affected see it in terms of
religion rather than commerce and technology, but they feel they are being
taken over by something ungodly and they feel helpless to do anything about
it. So they strike out the only way they know how -- as their religion
taught them. Like the prophet led them to take over the West under Islam.
Like al Quaeda was able to drive the Russians out of Afghanistan.
And we in the West are too busy competing in the global market to pay
attention to their fears. We feel we have to move forward with all of our
technologies. We can't take the time to make technology conform to
religious belief. The culture that doesn't move forward will find itself
too far back to catch up in a short period of time. If you are illiterate,
you're locked out of the internet and the global market. Cars are becoming
too complex for a third-world, back-yard mechanic to understand and fix.
The whole world and the culture that underlies it is becoming too complex
for the people who aren't running fast enough to keep up. And they resent
it.
And that's the crux of the battle in my mind. It won't matter how we try to
appease the people in the countries that are being drowned in the rushing
river of change. We won't be able to do it. They will resent the changes
taking place and will blame us for them. They will be frustrated because
they can't understand what's going on or what to do about it. They will see
us as hegemonic invaders forcing our culture on them. And in a sense we
are. But the river doesn't stop just because someone is drowning in it.
And neither will we.
Cheers,
Grant
_________________________________________________________________
STOP MORE SPAM with the new MSN 8 and get 2 months FREE*
http://join.msn.com/?page=features/junkmail
===============================================================
This was distributed via the memetics list associated with the
Journal of Memetics - Evolutionary Models of Information Transmission
For information about the journal and the list (e.g. unsubscribing)
see: http://www.cpm.mmu.ac.uk/jom-emit
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Tue 19 Nov 2002 - 16:36:25 GMT