MY GLOBAL ISSUES CRITERIA

OVERVIEW

  1. The Individual is King: this was the central principle of revisionist Zionist leader Zeev Jabotinsky. His Labor Zionist counterpart Berl Katzenelson, defined Socialism as the upliftment of man, and advocated individual self realization. Neither referred to the Platonic ideal of the human being but rather to the concrete real human being. Many 19th and 20th century ideologies have sacrificed the concrete human being in favor of the abstract idea of the human being. The experience of Communism has demonstrated that this approach is a recipe for disaster. Communism sacrificed millions of real human beings in the service of an unsubstantiated, abstract, concept of an ideal humanity. This must be a cautionary warning for future social commentators.
  2. The Community: No human being is an island. No one can live alone and certainly no one can fulfill their individual capacities and give meaning to their lives in isolation. We live in communities. What kind of communal frameworks and communities do we need to enable us to realize our capacities and give fulfillment to our lives? In Israel the Kibbutz was to have been the proper answer to this question. But its own Platonic problem was its undoing, as it pursued an unsubstantiated kibbutz ideal instead of asking what real live individual kibbutzniks required in order to realize their human potential.
  3. The Economy: No community dwells alone. It survives within an economic framework. What kind of economy is capable of sustaining the kind of community that would enable us to realize our capacities? It would be a dynamic, innovative, productive, profitable economy with an ever-growing number of options reflecting the striking opportunities of human potential within the new global reality. A sluggish, undynamic, unprofitable, unproductive economy hostile to the new global reality and limiting our options will not suffice. An economy can be super efficient and because of its social ideology still tolerate immoral social situations such as: inequality before the law, racial discrimination and grinding poverty. But an inefficient economy can never sustain, over the long term, a moral society no matter what the abstracted, idealized, “moral” intent of its social ideology. In such a situation the declared social values become objects of contempt and cynicism and produce a social reality opposite to what was intended.
  4. The Society: No economy survives in isolation; it is subsumed within a more general social reality. What kind of society do we require which would enable us to sustain the kind of economy we need without selling ourselves to economic considerations only? I have never agreed with either Adam Smith or Karl Marx that human beings are motivated solely by economic values. The human being is also economic and motivated greatly by economic values and any social ideology that ignores this and does not enable and encourage a dynamic economy is guaranteed to fail. For the individual will strive to realize him or herself no matter what and a dynamic modern economy is necessary for this. In this I oppose the new anti-modernists as represented by the fundamentalist Greens, who express the wish to return humanity to a pre-technological reality.
  5. The Culture: Humans are primarily cultural and symbolic. We are psychological animals motivated by the abstract as much if not more than by the material. Unless we understand this we cannot understand the political history of the past several decades. How was it for example that Reagan won 60% of the vote when close to 60% of the voters, in poll after poll, supported social policies which reflected the Democratic national platform? How was the Thatcher phenomenon possible when 70% of the English public still identified themselves as working class at the height of the Thatcher era? The answer is that both Reagan and Thatcher conquered the national symbols, the prisms through which each people saw its own identity. Reagan co-opted patriotism and religiosity and projected a friendly humane humor, the quintessential American. Mrs. Thatcher, the iron lady, projected an image of a world role and values that apparently many post-imperial English were nostalgic for. In addition she played the petit bourgeois character of the English working class for all it was worth when she all but gave away council flats to their tenants thereby satisfying the “my home is my castle” creed of most Englishmen. You cannot understand “Solidarity” all but destroying the Polish economy and lowering living standards, in order to make Poland ungovernable by the communists, the army or anyone else that did not reflect the will of the Polish people to achieve national independence and freedom. The first Palestinian “Intifada” lowered living standards by 50% for abstractions such as national independence and sovereignty. And Israeli politics has reflected the American reality for the past three decades; a majority vote for “Likud” led governments while in the polls a majority support “Labor” policies. The reason? The “Likud” has conquered the national symbols. If culture forms the basis of both society and economy then what cultural values and symbols are required to sustain the economy and society we need in order to fulfill ourselves as human beings?
  6. The Country: What kind of country do we need? We need a country that creates human added value within the context of the global reality of the 21st
  7. The World: What kind of world do we need and what are to be our relationships to that world: of our community, our economy, our society, our culture and our country? For no country or nation dwells alone, it never has, it does not now, and given the new global reality, it certainly never will.

This is my intellectual framework when writing about any issue.