[from the math4wisdom listserv, some typos corrected]
Andrius: Kirby, Thank you for your letter!
Kirby: And thank you as well.
There’s a quasi-polarized debate that simmers on the back burner, sometimes front burner, featuring “globalism versus nationalism”.
In conjuring images of EPCOT (Disney theme park in Orlando) I was suggesting these two isms need not be opposed to one another. I think to steer a nation (a “ship of state”) wisely through complex waters, one needs to think globally. “Think globally, act locally” is how the phrase goes. Some thinkers, like Wendell Berry, think “thinking globally” is an illusion. That’s a worthy discussion in itself.
These are themes I meditate about in my blogs (or “Quaker journals” as I sometimes call them among Friends). I think we have many flavors of both globalist and nationalist, so these terms in themselves are misleading insofar as they imply two singular points of view. I think of myself as a globalist, but in no way is my thinking a carbon copy of a George Soros or some Rockefeller. I’m no carbon copy of Bucky either, I just think his thinking is underappreciated at our own risk (a Casino Math computation), and developing his reputation as “America’s greatest futurist” (of the 1900s we could say) would be to our benefit. A hurdle has been to persuade more people that his mathematics is…
