In response to Doug, Ted writes:
> I think there are seeds, but finding and nurturing them is no easy matter. In Kurosawa's To Live, the Faustian protagonist has a very difficult time discovering what it would be "to live" and when he does manage this finds he has to draw on the whole of his new won strength and reason to figure out how to accomplish the reform that produces the moment to which he can say stay and then joyfully take his leave - swinging on a child's swing in a playground he and a group of women have managed to create out of a bit of ugly, polluted urban space. This represents what I would call "scientific socialism," i.e. rational optimism.
It has also been called Buddhism LOL.
As I see it, the difficulty is that leftist Western-trained thinkers have built-in obstacles in their methods of thinking. They may be opposed to capitalism, but all they can accomplish is a mild mitigation of the ravages of capitalism as capitalism is the natural economic system to grow out of western thinking.
Western thought had an inauspicious birth. It acquired its religion from Abrahamic thought and its philosophy from Greek thought. These two streams have been in competition ever since. This competition has grown increasingly hostile leading to an ever more violent culture/society as each stream tries to subsume the other.
Western thought also adopted a model-based system of thinking rather than a computational one. For this reason, until the time of Newton Western measurements of astronomical distances were faulty, while comparable Indian measurements were very accurate since Indian thought was computational rather than model-based.
With the rise of computers, the benefits of a computational approach have become ever more evident in the West, though model-based thinking still predominates.
Indian thought also prized debate and put less emphasis on premises (no, it was not "ends justify the means" thinking LOL). This emphasis on conclusions and computational thought might be a better way to proceed than the usual western way of model-based thought.
I googled Nussbaum/cosmopolitanism when Ted cited it (I thought maybe it was a philosphy based on a drink), and after reading what it said about overcoming tribalism, I thought it would face the same problem I have written about before: the unwillingness/inability for Western thinkers to modify their concept of self and identity. As someone once before posted, it seems that leftists always stop short of taking the next logical step in their thinking about identity. Maybe the separation period is over and it is finally time to divorce ourselves from Western notions of self. There are notions of self that do not have capitalism as their logical outgrowth.
Of course, no Western-trained thinkers like to hear this. Part of what Chomsky wrote (quoted in another post today) is how I feel when I bring up the issue of identity/individualism:
"Quite generally, if anything departs even slightly to the critical side of doctrinal orthodoxy and for some reason is not simply ignored (the usual case), then the typical reaction is a tantrum, with outlandish charges, endless deceit, pouting and ridicule -- but in general, fear verging on terror that the barriers to "correct thinking" might be even marginally breached."
Brian Dauth Queer Buddhist Resister