Charlie Rose

robdverity  02/15/2011 06:09 PM Report

Egypt may be a microcosm of a geo-problem, i.e. a world dilemma. Population (over) growth. That is growth in excess of its sustainability. Egypt is mostly desert. It's ec. viability doubtless dependent on non-agri. bus., which will require an educated populace. As in the US not an automatic given. Multiply this by most of the nations on the planet. Egypt's form of govt. may be its lesser prob.

JohnGelles  02/14/2011 05:25 PM Report

Egypt last weekend reawakened the "the dream of a prosperous free and happy life."

That is our dream after two-hundred and 34 years of nation building after a revolution. It is the dream of many Egyptians who are educated enough to know the modern world outside of Egypt.

It is also the dream of Russians, Chinese, Muslims and Christians, in a world in the midst of an economic crisis and not yet over the nearly 100 years of war and revolution that made the 20th Century the bloodiest on record.

There remains a great divide between religious-political fanaticism and rational designs for pluralism. And there exists a second divide between pragmatic political economy bent on full employment -- that would eliminate unemployment -- as we eliminated almost all slavery and debtors' prisons.

So there stands in the way of the universal dream of heaven on earth the history of our failure to achieve it after thousands of years of trying.

Each of us has a choice of how much time to invest in the universal dream captured in the GOLDEN RULE and the individualist dream of becoming NUMBER ONE in something, sometime, somewhere.

Charlie Rose has the number one middle-brow TV show on earth. We dream he may capture the high-brow title as well. If we in this audience are trying to help him, our help is not apparent.

Of course the tools we have to do this are not as good as they might be: we do NOT really try to have one comment build upon another. We have no editors here on the grounds that peer reviews have editors, internet forums cannot afford them.

Perhaps, just as social networks have connected a new voice of the people, maybe internet forums will morph into people power suitable for "forming more perfect unions." Our Preamble promises this. But the promise is not kept.

In today's crises I always return to the Second Bill of Rights. Its premise is that necessitous men are fodder for the ruthless to war on each other. The Second Bill would add to an open mind a pocket full of money -- so that those with a fault full of money, all their own, could not enslave those with less.

It hard for many to accept that this economic tragedy is the most important factor keeping us apart -- ready to kill the stranger whenever the bugles call. And perhaps it isn't. There scant unemployment and poverty in many jurisdiction, such as Scandinavia, Finland, Singapore and the Channel Islands Jersey and Guernsey, for instance. Do they prove that rational free enterprise is a trail worth blazing? I hope so.

People complain the Egyptians have as yet no doctrine and no leading minds. And they complain further that in the West the doctrine is flawed and the leading minds diseased.

Which leaves us with a vacuum in doctrine and leadership that nobody is trying to fill with more than garbage. Or am I wrong? Can we combine the best on the WW web with best of the peer reviewed journals in social science to create a new futurism with hope we can believe it? Is is morning here on earth? Or are we in for greater error in favor of the worst our species has to offer?

REMant  02/14/2011 11:17 AM Report

The writers on Jadaliyya also refute the idea that this was merely a Facebook or Twitter phenomenon, and point to a long history of activism over precisely these issues. The Notre Dame prof arrived just the day before. He struck me as belonging to the "progressive" camp described earlier.