But to concede a high degree of indeterminacy is not to throw up one's hands at the futility of making any judgments at all. We can discern good and evil, and for the most part the consequences of imparting good into the system will be good, and of imparting evil into the system will be evil. Which means that actions that are in alignment with Wholeness tend to build Wholeness, and those that are in violation of Wholeness tend to reverberate in ways that undermine the wholeness of the larger system.
When it came to making a judgment about my investment posture, I felt that the emergence of an American leadership that had shown itself to be arrogant, reckless, dishonest and incompetent shifted the probabilities about the future in a strongly negative direction. And even though I could not foresee what the specific manifestations might be of the blow to the world's order of having its leading nation ruled by such people, it was still rational to give more weight to fear and less to greed-those two motivations at work in the markets.
What actually started me moving toward that move to hunker down financially was the wave of intense and often violent protests over the Danish cartoons connecting the prophet Mohammed with terrorism. I intuitively felt, this wouldn't be happening had there been no arrogantly bungled American invasion of Iraq.
But who could have predicted there would be a furor over cartoons in an obscure Danish publication?
But, my skeptical investor friends might have said, what difference does it make? Indeed, those demonstrations from London to Indonesia did not move the markets.
The answer may be visible now in the smoke rising over Beirut and Haifa, which gives added testimony to what that rage over the Danish cartoons conveyed to me: not only a deepening of the fault line within humanity between an increasingly jihadist Islam and the West, but also more generally of an increasingly brittle international system, one in which disturbances do not get absorbed and dissipated but tend rather to reverberate.
The markets were not pleased with the latest developments, but have now stabilized. Perhaps none of this will play out in ways that deeply impact global investors. But a destabilized system can spin out of control in a variety of ways that are not foreseeable.
In a world in which the web of interconnections is woven so subtly and deep, the wholeness of our world can only be gleaned by signs and intuitions, never grasped in all its concreteness-like explicit scenarios of how a dark and dangerous American leadership, which is aligned with the interests of great corporate powers, can make the world unsafe for investors.
The Sins of the Bushites as Violations of Wholeness
But there's a deeper truth that connects the idea of "Wholeness" to that piece I wrote about "How Bush Has Weakened America, and How That Explains Why the World is Falling Apart." The reason that this Bush presidency is so destructive in the world is that it is so out of tune with the meaning and importance of Wholeness.
The core teachings of the spiritual traditions point reliably toward Wholeness. One might say that an overarching teaching is: Respect the Wholeness of Things. The Golden Rule of Christianity, for example, says to treat others as you would treat yourself-in other words to perceive oneself and others from a transcendent perspective that recognizes the importance and value of other people to be equal to one's own. The Delphic Oracle's injunction to "Know Thyself" might be seen as calling both for an integration of the self and for a recognition of one's place in the larger scheme of things. The Jewish commitment to obeying the commandments might be described as involving an alignment of one's conduct with a larger order believed to be designed by God. And so forth.
In that perspective, consider the characteristics of the Bush administration that, according to my earlier piece, account for the weakening of American leadership and the consequent disorder in the world.
I began that exposition with this: "The Bush administration came to power determined to extend American dominance and to reject all limitations on their freedom of action on the world stage."
In other words, this administration acted contrary to the Golden Rule, playing instead a zero-sum power game in which its gains are another's loss. From this it has reaped distrust from other nations of the world and their peoples.
And it refuses to be constrained by the various laws and agreements and treaties by which earlier American leaders have been willing to be constrained for the sake a beneficial global order. From its actions, it has subverted the rule of law and opened the door further to the destructive -unwhole-disorder of "might makes right."
The characteristic that I attribute to this Bush administration more than any other is "arrogance," which involves an over-inflated sense of one's importance and capabilities. It is a matter of not knowing thyself, of being deluded about one's true place in the larger scheme. In particular, its botching of its venture in is attributed to its assuming that it already knew all it needed to know, and turned a deaf ear to others who knew better. They have proved themselves as unwilling to bow down before "reality" as before the law- cf. the famous statement by an administration official denigrating the "reality-based" people, and claiming that they "create" reality to which others must accommodate. Another way of not recognizing their place in the larger picture.
When it came to making a judgment about my investment posture, I felt that the emergence of an American leadership that had shown itself to be arrogant, reckless, dishonest and incompetent shifted the probabilities about the future in a strongly negative direction. And even though I could not foresee what the specific manifestations might be of the blow to the world's order of having its leading nation ruled by such people, it was still rational to give more weight to fear and less to greed-those two motivations at work in the markets.
What actually started me moving toward that move to hunker down financially was the wave of intense and often violent protests over the Danish cartoons connecting the prophet Mohammed with terrorism. I intuitively felt, this wouldn't be happening had there been no arrogantly bungled American invasion of Iraq.
But who could have predicted there would be a furor over cartoons in an obscure Danish publication?
The answer may be visible now in the smoke rising over Beirut and Haifa, which gives added testimony to what that rage over the Danish cartoons conveyed to me: not only a deepening of the fault line within humanity between an increasingly jihadist Islam and the West, but also more generally of an increasingly brittle international system, one in which disturbances do not get absorbed and dissipated but tend rather to reverberate.
The markets were not pleased with the latest developments, but have now stabilized. Perhaps none of this will play out in ways that deeply impact global investors. But a destabilized system can spin out of control in a variety of ways that are not foreseeable.
In a world in which the web of interconnections is woven so subtly and deep, the wholeness of our world can only be gleaned by signs and intuitions, never grasped in all its concreteness-like explicit scenarios of how a dark and dangerous American leadership, which is aligned with the interests of great corporate powers, can make the world unsafe for investors.
The Sins of the Bushites as Violations of Wholeness
But there's a deeper truth that connects the idea of "Wholeness" to that piece I wrote about "How Bush Has Weakened America, and How That Explains Why the World is Falling Apart." The reason that this Bush presidency is so destructive in the world is that it is so out of tune with the meaning and importance of Wholeness.
The core teachings of the spiritual traditions point reliably toward Wholeness. One might say that an overarching teaching is: Respect the Wholeness of Things. The Golden Rule of Christianity, for example, says to treat others as you would treat yourself-in other words to perceive oneself and others from a transcendent perspective that recognizes the importance and value of other people to be equal to one's own. The Delphic Oracle's injunction to "Know Thyself" might be seen as calling both for an integration of the self and for a recognition of one's place in the larger scheme of things. The Jewish commitment to obeying the commandments might be described as involving an alignment of one's conduct with a larger order believed to be designed by God. And so forth.
In that perspective, consider the characteristics of the Bush administration that, according to my earlier piece, account for the weakening of American leadership and the consequent disorder in the world.
I began that exposition with this: "The Bush administration came to power determined to extend American dominance and to reject all limitations on their freedom of action on the world stage."
In other words, this administration acted contrary to the Golden Rule, playing instead a zero-sum power game in which its gains are another's loss. From this it has reaped distrust from other nations of the world and their peoples.
And it refuses to be constrained by the various laws and agreements and treaties by which earlier American leaders have been willing to be constrained for the sake a beneficial global order. From its actions, it has subverted the rule of law and opened the door further to the destructive -unwhole-disorder of "might makes right."
The characteristic that I attribute to this Bush administration more than any other is "arrogance," which involves an over-inflated sense of one's importance and capabilities. It is a matter of not knowing thyself, of being deluded about one's true place in the larger scheme. In particular, its botching of its venture in is attributed to its assuming that it already knew all it needed to know, and turned a deaf ear to others who knew better. They have proved themselves as unwilling to bow down before "reality" as before the law- cf. the famous statement by an administration official denigrating the "reality-based" people, and claiming that they "create" reality to which others must accommodate. Another way of not recognizing their place in the larger picture.
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