Spengler analysis considered, religion and economy

Americans Play Monopoly, Russians Chess

This is an analysis of the above Asia Times piece.

Spengler over-simplifies the thought process by which the US came to emphasize economic bottom-lines in its foreign policies. He attributes it to American stupidity. However true that may be to degrees in specific cases, it ignores the simplification motive in approaching foreign policy as a vehicle of trade. Brilliant math does not complicate simple equations, but simplifies the complex.

Spengler also ignores the notion that trade and economy are vital to all nations and therefore more likely to foster peace than enmity. While that is not a monolithic rule, it remains a principle of interdependence. What needs more attention in trade and global finance, is the ethical training of students throughout their educational lives before they can be unleashed on the world. For those not educated but business savvy, there should be tax policies rewarding verified ethical practices. However, ethics courses are not enough.

The US government, under the guise of capitalism, repeats the USSR's mistake by damaging its own cultural foundations and fabrics with secular materialist emphases in educating young people for tomorrow's roles in commerce, trade and their regulation. Education for commercial roles has become a route to secularization of society in general. With homegrown ethics fading, a mere curriculum in ethics is not going to make business persons ethical. 

Commercial manipulation of ever more partisan law and government has deepened the lack of ethics at a systemic level. This analyst believes that religious wiring within people is in part genetic, anatomical and physiological across all cultures. That wiring will convey energies through individuals and populations that will seek expression, and Islam is the fastest rising religious faith promising to answer the failures of capitalism. The massive ethical failures among U.S. corporate and financial leaders highlights one Islamic value that may gain traction: that against lending at interest.

There is value in enforcing constitutional protections of religion and in restraining anti-religious groups from making government their agent against faith and religion in the U.S. In the U.K., France, Germany and Russia, Muslim populations are growing multiples faster than indigenous populations which have been dropping their religious identities and leaving a vacuum.

It is this analyst's thesis that extreme religions are not best dealt with via secularism, but via the checking and balancing effect of robust, free and spiritually focused religions.