Monday, December 20, 2004

A Certain Breed of Arrogance

This morning I'm feeling saucy, so, having just spent the evening defending my globalist viewpoints against an assault of Kaplan and Huntington quotes, I'd like to make a very broad and very firm statement. Simply put, it takes a certain breed of arrogance to firmly believe that within one's own lifetime some massive, tectonic shift in the function of the world will occur. This is why Huntington's "Clash of Civilizations" and Kaplan's "Coming Anarchy" are tantamount to Chicken Little's "The Sky is Falling," with their implications of a radically altered world, shaped by the ravaging forces of chaos and the imperial might of the U.S. military (and dollar).

The world is an ever more complex place than that. There will be no titanic struggle between Good and Evil for the fate of the world fought on pay-per-view. My apologies to the cable networks. I know you were banking on that one. Instead of a "clash" I think we can expect more of a "mild friction" as two imperfectly matched networks try to aggregate. The struggle between Good and Evil? I'm afraid it will be somewhat Biblical. Oh, I mean Biblical like Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John Biblical, not Revelation. Biblical as in personal, interpersonal, and very, very human. I'm afraid that the images of John Wayne singlehandedly taking down Osama, thus bringing about peace on Earth will have to wait for the DVD edition of the 21st century. For now, we'll have to content ourselves with slowly, haltingly working towards "a future worth creating."

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