Further comments on "Extremists, Fundamentalists and Civilization"

Jonathan (Jock) Gill (Principal, Penfield Gill, Inc.)

Jock Gill

Here are a few new comments.

1] I was speaking with a Japanese woman, an artist and design teacher, on Saturday at a crew race - our daughters row for the Brown University team. Her initial take was that the differences between Japan and America were stronger than the similarities. I suggested her that the approach to personal responsibility was a strong commonality. She made the interesting reply that the important difference was that in America one could recover from a "loss of face" much more readily than can be done in Japan. I described a Japanese friend who had experienced several difficult challenges and had, after appropriately long times, re-emerged as a successful person, if, indeed, not in exactly the same field. So here too there were similarities. A good question is how can we describe the various ways different cultures deal with what we in the West would call forgiveness, redemption, hope and salvation? What role do these values play, for example, in a criminal justice system?
Is a system without these values only a punishment system?

2] I heartily recommend the book "Natural Capitalism." It would be most interesting to understand how different cultures view the "four forms of capital" and the idea of a new revolution in Resource Productivity. The book has some very interesting components for what I believe we need to invent: a People First politics.

The authors have generously put the entire book online at the above URL. I recommend starting with chapters 1, 14, and 15.