Major Points About Civilization

Enlightenment Civilization vs. Local Culture

To my mind, the basic elements of enlightenment civilization include some structural aspects (democracy, some form of guarantee of individual rights) and some cultural elements (respect for legitimately enacted laws, respect for literacy).

There's a difference between local culture and enlightenment civilization, and a country can share Enlightenment civilization without being a western country. I think that trend is going to increase, and that the USA is going to have to face declining power in a world of expanding democracy, but NOT democracies that share Western culture. India is a good example of an Enlightenment civilized country that doesn't necessarily share a common culture with the Western democracies.

Developing Trend Toward Democracy vs. Enlightenment Civilization

The world is in a trend toward democracy, even in many countries that are quite repressive such as China or the Muslim countries of the Middle East. It is common for the evolution of a country toward democracy to include tremendous turmoil and violence, including foreign wars.

However, as countries in the Middle East (especially) undergo this turmoil, they represent a considerable threat both to Western local culture and to Enlightenment civilization as a whole. Islam in particular has a very strong reactionary culture that opposes the democratic trend in those countries, and that is successfully putting a theocratic, non-enlightenment twist into these democratic institutions. To the extent that this trend toward a theocratic democracy succeeds, eliminating the concept of human rights from the concept of democracy, this represents a real threat to what I consider civilization.

Thus, during the time that Islamic countries and other cultures in Africa, central Asia and East Asia are going through the tumultuous transition to democracy, we are in many ways in active conflict with their reactionary elements.......

Using the Net to build civilization

I mentioned in a prior post the Distributed Proofreaders Site, which allows anyone to help with the project of turning scans of public-domain books into e-books that can be read and (more importantly) searched.

One of the ways to improve civilization is to improve communication, not only among regular users of the internet but also among scientists, researchers, and scholars.

In addition to projects like Distributed Proofreaders, which allow users to contribute brainpower to a project, there are several projects that allow users to contribute unused processor time to add computing power to a research project. These "grid" projects are mainly oriented toward scientific applications.

One example is the Compute against cancer project, which supports cancer research with shared computing power. I haven't been able to find many projects that are currently in operation. If anyone knows of any, please comment and give details!

The benefit to projects like these are obvious; using the shared power of many people, massive contributions can be made toward scientific goals.