We’re facing a great extinction of human indigenous cultures and languages and peoples and wisdoms.  More than most people I’m focused on this subject, and on learning what we can and what we must from the great variety of traditional, hunter-gatherer, ‘close(r) to nature’ tribes and nations and wisdoms that are threatened or that have disappeared.

(we, the world mono-culture, as well as we, the Jewish/Israeli subculture I most identify with.)

But among those who are also highlighting this issue and fighting for indigenous rights–I’m right now thinking of Wade Davis’ lecture on TED on behalf of his role as National Geographic photographer, but it applies in general to most people who write on this subject– is an unexamined belief that we should preserve as many, or all, of these remaining cultures as we can.  That we should embrace a certain kind of radical equality of cultures, at least of all of those who didn’t fall into the generally congruent sets of ’sins’ that encompass the Agricultural Revolution, the Industrial Revolution, colonization.

Usually I’m the one making an argument along these lines– that some of these cultures were superior in many ways to civilizational or modern or our cultures, that we all should consider those values as alternatives, etc.

I want to agree, passionately, with the plea to stop destroying the world’s remaining indigenous cultures and habitats, yes, to stop wrecking the ethnic diversity as well as the biodiversity of the planet.

But there’s a caveat. I found in Davis, as with others who make the multiculturalism argument, a dangerous presumption of moral relativity.  Study the following statement carefully: All Cultures Are Not Created Equal.

There are some values, some practices, some ideas, some moralities that SHOULD be destroyed, that are NOT ok.

From cannibals in the Ecuadorian Amazon (see Schneebaum’s “Keep the River on your Right”) to the New Guinea tribe where initiation for teenage boys includes brutal homosexual violation (mentioned in Gladwell’s “Blink”) to honor killings of girls by Muslims in a number of locales, we must remember that human cultures do have distortions that are not mere relative and arbitrary distinctions.

Certain customs should not be allowed to continue, even if we don’t fully understand the meaning and context of how and why they do what they do, even if certain rituals or wisdoms will be lost forever. I’m quite happy that the Aztec mass-sacrifice-cannibalism ceremonies will never happen again, even if I have to thank a conquistador for that. It is often forgotten that the British Empire, certainly guilty of great disruption and devastation to more of the world’s land, peoples, and cultures, than just about any other people or entity, was also almost single-handedly responsible for ending slavery on almost all the Earth.

What this does imply is that there is a universal standard of morality. This is different from a universal morality, such as the Christian missionaries or crusaders, or today’s al Qaeda or Ayatollahs, would impose.

In a world of globalization and global awareness and global ecological interdependence, all of us are now at least minimally interested in all others. Rather than being dictated by a Pope or by the pathetically ineffectual UN, this standard needs to be more like the communal, consensual standards of behavior that govern (or used to govern) most indigenous polities around the world. Plenty of room for each to do his or her own thing, but with limits… when one culture is out of line, there needs to be a real mechanism for the consensus of peoples to change it, to not accept it, to provide safe havens and alternatives for victims. In the worst cases, let’s face it, there does need to be conquest and de-Nazification of errant cultures. The world has become too small for us each to ignore the other’s dirty laundry.

Many nation-states are corrupt dictatorships or worse, therefore the UN is doomed to failure, as it is only a representative body of those particular nations’ regimes and their interests. Many peoples and nations– particularly indigenous– are not represented, and can’t be effectively empowered without destabilizing a great many nation-states. (That might need to happen…)

We need to think out of the current boxes– but not with mere platitudes and an uncritical belief in equality of cultures, values, and moralities. And we need to have this conversation soon– because the world’s ecological crises are inextricably bound up with these issues of power and land-based wisdom. Maybe we need to solve this first before worrying about carbon footprints…

jazz blues textures what might the flood of colors look like to be

truly free in our land

to rise up to each moment’s potential textures

of feeling & love & connectedness

stained glass

browns & blues, yam ha tichon & shefela, denuded hillsides & stubborn pines, cold trickles of mayan wonder, prickly pears rare air floating down over Modiin highway- why ‘they’ and ‘us’

are we Jews one? or many? Israeli & not? separate? wet

& dry, sky & ground, sounding out the rhythms of town & city & farm & wadi –
BAM!
There! the shock of  lightning lightening up our awareness

flash of understanding Overstanding on our land-ing El Al down from the skies

on the wings of eagles dipping & surging & soaring & plunging to the kill,

fierce without remorse or pity are we conquerors or are we not? The Lakota wants to know,

No we are not not-conquerors and yet ain brira trapped where we cannot move forward or back without belief in ourselves daring to ride the waves forward into the future for real
Israel.

This is thought-provoking.

Implied but not explicit is the idea of scarcity as opposed to abundance.  In a zero-sum world, a world of scarcity, where for every winner there must be a loser, anti-semitism is virulent.  But when the mindset shifts into abundance, where one success begets another, where more adds up to much more and doesn’t subtract and make someone else less, anti-semitism fades or becomes irrelevant, as in much of today’s scientific and entrepreneurial sphere (where Jews, not coincidentally, excel).

Visiting America- New York– for a Passover trip, I am reminded of the sheer abundance, the overwhelming profusion of goods and services and lush forests, buildings and bars, people of every color, options of entertainment and amusement and food… in the city it’s even more so, if you have the money you can order literally ANYthing to your apartment at any time of day or night…

Given that so much of human struggles for the last several thousand years have dealt with simply having enough, materially, I don’t want to be too quick to dismiss this land of plenty as empty materialism.  There IS something special about the American Dream, in spite of such excess, obesity, and greed as we see today.  America and Israel are the only two nation-states on earth specifically founded on an ideal rather than mere accidents of history, ethnicity, or empire.  Individual pursuits in almost any field are encouraged, if you have initiative and stubbornness there are genuine opportunities, there is money, even a black man can become president…

The devil’s side of the bargain is a certain disconnect, an alienation from specific identity, from place, from heritage, to join in the game that’s being enacted.  As there are so little real consequences to financial irresponsibility– one can declare bankruptcy, start over, even many times– then there really is no reason not to pursue one’s dreams, to feel ‘freedom’ is something tangible, a sense of limitless possibility is still something that shines to the world.  And the super rich can lose far more money than us little people and get bailed out by the government, thus reminding all of us that these green pieces of paper are really just part of the game, none of it is real, don’t you want to play?

Yet individual fulfillment is really the ceiling, because the values of the collective culture don’t have space, don’t even have language, for other kinds of purpose.  I saw this among native Americans, this disinterest in the game… and then I drank the Zionist kool-aid and moved to Israel.  Now I’m an outsider, seeing the American dream with the eyes of someone who has a way OUT.

And more clearly than ever before, I see the danger for Jews to be in America.  I don’t think one can be both.  Not on the level of loyalty: American Jews certainly have demonstrated that they can place America’s interests over those of Israel’s when they conflict (see Kissinger, Ross, etc.) and even American Israel advocacy organizations are conscious of the need to find common causes and arguments that Israeli and American interests coincide.   Not on the level of anti-semitism: America may be the most open and welcome Jewish diaspora home ever, even including the original Babylon.  But for a Jew to be alive to being a Jew, then he is merely an individual if he lives in America– sure, with all those possibilities of personal growth and fulfillment, but cut off from the true drama of Jews in the world today, which  no matter how you cut it, is manifest and expressed in the holy land.

It’s a trite truism that one’s consciousness changes when one becomes or builds a family– not just in it for yourself anymore, the values change, the responsibilities change.  Even or especially with dysfunctional families.  Well it’s not so different with tangibly and physically joining the project of the Jewish people attempting to live in the Land of Israel.  This is not about justifying the flawed secular modern Israeli nationalism; increasingly Jewish identity in the holy land is a hybrid of ancient and modern ideologies, of religious and tribal and ethnic resonances, which cannot be reduced to any one of those.  Many Israelis, and Jews who live in Israel, wouldn’t even know how to start describing the sources or reasons for their sense of purpose in living there.  It’s not necessarily coming from a rational or logical place.

Yet right from that alleged irrationality comes the only truly rational, sustainable basis for long-term human life anywhere on earth.  Modernity, secularity, is inescapably cosmopolitan and rootless; only by believing one’s great-grandchildren will inhabit and inherit the same land, can one take the kind of responsibility for the earth that is needed.  Consumerism will cannibalize all our land, all our resources, unless a corresponding counterweight is found in the committment of a tribe to a homeland.  Jews, as the paradigmatic exiled people, as the tribe whose stories of enslavement and dispersion and persecution have been writ large for the world to see, can show the way for all the world’s alienated people to become re-grounded, in their own identities and heritages, and even to rebuild such basic human birthright where all history has been lost.

George Soros says the financial system has already disintegrated, and Paul Volcker agrees with him. It has already collapsed, in some ways more comprehensively (and certainly more globally) than in 1929. It’s just running on fumes– or maybe we’re like the cartoon character who ran off a cliff but is just starting to look down and doesn’t yet realize he’s supposed to fall.

…[the Mayor considers the implications of helping the Ghostbusters stop the Apocalyspe... and asks what if they're wrong?]

The debt of western countries, especially America and England, is supported in large part by the central banks of developing and eastern countries– most of all China.  China holds hundreds of billions of dollars and pounds and euros as their currency reserve.  While it has been true for a long time that the dollar is the ‘reserve currency’ of most of the world, the US debt has skyrocketed in the last decade and has mostly been picked up by Asian countries.  And now that the US economy is crashing and the stimulus bill is vastly scaling up the debt and deficit, SOMEone has to keep lending America the money.  Japan, South Korea, Singapore, and other countries have also been major purchasers of US debt, but China is the biggest.  All of their economies depend on export trade to the US; thus the theory, or assumption, is that they cannot let America fail.

But people forget that they may not have the same goals, desires, or ideology as America or the west.  China is STILL run by the Chinese Communist Party.  Since the 70’s when they began to snap out of the insanity of Mao’s Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution, the communist leaders actually went back to their sources– and discovered what Marx had actually said: capitalism must precede communism.  It must grow, peak, and collapse- and from that place of ‘highest development’ would be ready to be succeeded by true communism, and the state would wither away. So the Chinese decided to try it: roll with world capitalism until it’s ready to collapse.

And boy have they ever.  Workshop for the world, skyscrapers, hundreds of millions of people brought into the world middle class, the most rapid industrialization the world has ever seen– as big as all previous ones combined.  But their leadership is still the same.  Quietly but certainly, it’s still the same communist leadership. They still openly believe in a communist future.  And somehow, all the western capitalist countries have become dependent on China for capital? Doesn’t this strike anyone else as odd?

I’m appalled and shocked that Kadima is leading the exit polls.  If people didn’t want to vote for Likud, if people were afraid to vote for a right-leaning party, if people had a personal dislike for Benjamin Netanyahu, I could respect their choice to vote for someone else, even if I disagreed– but have the decency to vote for a party with principles!  Have the decency to vote for Meretz, a real left-wing party that’s never had a corruption scandal! Vote for Labor, who at least has some genuine if utterly misguided socialist views!  Hell, vote Hadash, the mostly-Arab Communist Party of Israel, who at least stands for SOMEthing! Vote for right wing parties who also never are corrupt and are honest about their views about settlements and Arabs!

But Kadima, whose sole reason for existence is the comatose vegetable Sharon; whose only ‘issue’ was the withdrawal from Gaza– the most ridiculous failure of Israeli policy in the last 20 years (and that’s SAYING something!); the ‘party’ which proudly has NO ideology and stands for NOTHING at all; the party that claims as ‘victory’ the half-assed recent re-invasion of Gaza, which should never have been necessary, if not for Kadima’s withdrawal of all military and civilian presence, if not for Kadima’s tolerance of the growth of the Hamas regime there, if not for Kadima’s waiting for eight THOUSAND rockets to fall on Israel before it took action… Kadima! the party of Olmert, whose approval ratings make Bush look like Brange f’ing Lina– for six months ZERO percent of Israelis thought he was doing a good job… one and half million Israelis took to the streets demanding his resignation, which is more than voted for him in the first place!! Imagine 55 million Americans taking to the streets demanding Bush’s resignation!

How about some accountability for God’s sake!  Kadima is responsible for the utter failures of the Lebanon war, responsible for the Gaza war which killed 1400 Gazans but didn’t even defang Hamas, responsible for failing to make Israel’s case to the world… Kadima is responsible for Olmert’s corruption scandals.  Kadima is responsible for the horrible theft machine that the Israeli government has become.  Kadima deserves to be– to be charitable– retired.

I hope Kadima voters can look at themselves in the mirror.  I don’t know what’s wrong with them.  I feel like Americans felt in 2004, after Bush got re-elected in spite of his manifest idiocy.  But more is at stake here.  The definition of insanity is trying the same thing again and again after you know it doesn’t work.  Kadima is a failure.  Its policies are failures.

I hope to God that Livni fails to form a gov’t and that Netanyahu winds up prime minister.  His term as finance minister created Israel’s current prosperity and his appointment of Stanley Fischer helped create Israel’s current bank solvency and fiscal stability.  He’s shown that he can capably speak in English to the world about Iran, about Israel’s need for self defense, about the difference between terror and morality.  Unlike Livni’s tortured Neanderthal Englisch, which sounds like Ah-nold circa 1984.

It’s raining heavily today, for the first time in months of drought, so I take that as a good omen– that the evil king is fallen, that better times are coming.  But if we wind up with Livni, with Kad-f^&*g ima again, I’ll seriously consider forming my own party, or starting a revolution, or leaving.  Gee, maybe they’ll offer all the west bank to Hamas too! and the Golan to Syria and Hezbollah! In exchange for NOthing!  It’s done so well in Gaza, that idea! Maybe they’ll sell off all gov’t contracts to the mafia directly!  Maybe they’ll make Olmert Prime Minister for life or until Sharon, zombie-like, returns to power!

It may be hard for outsiders to understand why electing a ‘centrist’ party could be such a travesty.  Picture Rudy Blagogevich returning to power AFTER being convicted… picture an election a week after 9-11 where a party wins proposing ceding Afghanistan to Al-Qaeda, saying “we’re tired of fighting.  we’re tired of winning”.  I don’t have terms strong enough to describe to you how evil Kadima is.  Pure opportunists who simply want to stay in power.  One of the blessings and curses of living in Israel is that things MATTER, elections MATTER, positions matter… and to take no stand amounts to taking a stand.  To take no stand on corruption, to take no action as rockets continue to be shot from Gaza (even today!)– this is a stand FOR weakness.  FOR corruption. FOR terror.  In a country smaller than Vermont, with tens of thousands of armed monsters within walking distance and a massive economic crisis looming.  Like American Bush voters, Israelis may be secretly wishing for apocalypse.  And they may get it.

Meridith Whitney, one of the few analysts to successfully predict the current crisis, had a simple rule of thumb to determine the value of any given bank or financial firm: take a hard look at the crappiest assets they had bought or invested in with borrowed money, and figure out how much they’d be worth in a fire sale.

Now that sub-prime markets started pulling the rug out, and Ponzi schemes like Madoff and smaller ones have started to unravel, the creaky foundations of the whole interconnected capital markets are shattering.  As much as 40% of the world’s “cash” has simply disappeared, if it ever really existed beyond mere Enron-style projections.  New financial ‘instruments’ including derivatives and other creative accounting practices allowed huge amounts of money to move around.  But the bottom line is that they have caused the fundamental trust relationships that held up the basic belief in the VALUE of all money, not to say stocks, bonds, banks, etc., to be damaged if not destroyed. We’re all in that fire sale.

Where is this going? With cascading bank failures and a catastrophic credit crunch now resulting in massive layoffs even by “healthy” companies, more than ever the crisis is revealed as a crisis in belief, in faith.  It is naive to think that this problem can be solved at the level of awareness that created it– a paradigm that essentially took people’s belief in the value of any abstract measures such as money for granted. Previous currency collapses, over the last 60 years, could always be recovered from if there was a core of solid western currencies and economies to bail them out; third world debt could be absorbed as long as first world prosperity was relatively stable.  Now there are no givens, as the dollar, pound, Euro, and yen all face severe constriction whether inflationary or deflationary, and governments including the US hover on the edge of debt behavior which in any ordinary company or country would result in bankruptcy.

Responsible thinkers need to start planning for a world in which the only certainties are ‘needs’, fundamental commodities such as food and water, and barter.  And, sadly, guns and instability.  The 30’s– the last comparable time– led to massive reinventions of public life and ideology in every major developed country.  “Faith” in markets or banks, in currencies and basic concepts of value, in law and liberal civil society itself, nearly died– and was partly reborn or reinvested in fascism or communism.  This radical change did indeed revitalize major economies– but at a terrible human cost which was only fully paid by the devastation we collectively call WWII.

We need to confront the absolute necessity of providing a vision to the world, a cognitive and moral and even theological framework, within which civil society and economy and personal growth can be expressed.  The right question is not “will things really get ‘that bad’ again?” but “what can we do to give people hope and something to work for if and when things DO get that bad?” Prudent contingency planning demands it.  Currencies are not backed up by gold anymore– they’re not backed up by anything except people’s belief that they have value– belief which can change or collapse.  Our world could easily degenerate into the warlordism of China in the 20’s, the Afghanistans or Somalias of today, or the Europe of the 30’s.  Wise folk from all walks of life need to realize that we all need to take responsibility for our future and our lives, individually and collectively, as governments and institutions have failed us.  Obama is not a messiah and can’t save us.   And empty optimism that things will ‘get better’ or ‘turn around’ in defiance of concrete proof comes from the same kind of judgement that led to this collapse itself.