There is some evidence that poverty on a global scale is in fact diminishing. Only a few believers so far but the numbers can be defended.

I have been having an interesting discussion with the Islamic apologetics on the Beliefnet message boards. It has been pointed out on previous blog entries how the Honor-Shame structure of many Islamic societies makes dealing with them difficult.

Islamic Arabia is an honor-shame culture . In such cultures, the primary concern is what others believe about you. If others believe you are inferior, then you are humiliated and shamed, and you will hate not only those who perceive you in such a shameful way, but also the source of that perception.

This is the primary reason why the Israeli-Arab "problem" is insoluble at this point. Israel, by its very existence, is a humiliation to its neighbors, who, in all their hundreds of millions, lack the power to conquer a tiny state with seven million citizens. Worse, the quality of Israeli existence is a humiliation: Surrounded, constantly threatened with attack, vilified, dependent ultimately on the goodwill of the United States for survival, and yet Israel, at least in comparison to any other country in the Arab world, thrives. Its people live in freedom. It is incredibly productive. It is the only nation in the middle east to make the desert flower wholesale. Everything it accomplishes, every new height to which it rises, is a living rebuke to Arabia, which has done none of these things.

So far the responses of the apologetics are defensive is saying that the West runs on honor-shame as well with ludicrous and unrepresentative examples trumped up to illustrate their position. My position remains that as long as appearances of honor are more important in Islamic (or any other) countries than intrinsic integrity, not only will the Arab-Israeli problem remain intractable but those countries will fail to succeed in modernization. They will have a dearth of intellectual property with which to compete in the world of ideas and will only matter as source of natural resources and cheap labor in the legitimate arena. In other arenas we can expect them to be the source of asymmetrical violence.

This raises the question of how does one go about changing an honor-shame culture to one of intrinsic integrity. William Quick notes that were that has happened historically the nation has had to be so decisively defeated that the cultural assumptions are called into question. Who is going to undertake this task? In Japan the cultural conversion occurred after a stunning military defeat and a benign but progressive occupation by a Western power. Are there moderates in these countries that are working for change? Can they muster enough power to call the assumptions of their culture into question?

Recent debate about reproductive cloning and the idea of manufacturing babies with engineered characteristics has revived many of the old eugenics arguments. But it occurs to me that maybe we need to talk more about the de facto eugenics that is being practiced today by those segments of our society that encourage or sometimes compel their members to have as many children as possible. This rampant reproduction has the effect of increasing the prominence of these segments in society has a whole and over the long run can serve to advance the agenda of the high birthrate folks over the folks who choose a lower birthrate. Regulation of birthrate is distasteful. The best solution I can think of is for the low birthrate people to be sensitive to the existence of those high birthrate segments that tend to have political agendas. Using this sensitivity it would behoove the low birthrate folks to target a portion of their political arguments to the folks tending toward the other agenda. One hopes that in the world of competing ideas the default agenda for some can be modified.

Work is proceeding on the next thing after silicon for computing devices. When advanced optical or electron beam lithography finally run out of steam we will be able to use tailored viruses to construct computing devices that operate on the quantum level.