DougR:

don't buy your argument that folks in the West are so lacking in humanitarianism, so greedy that all we worship is the bottom line, so altruistic that all we can think of doing productively is inventing gadgets that make life more comfortable.

Not my argument at all.

We have a robust engineering timeline with lots of successes. We manage any material problem pretty routinely now.

But we grope in the dark when it comes to understanding and managing problems involving our own spiritual natures; we communicate rather poorly and tend to do really stupid things socially, the invasion of Iraq being one example. Why don't we know how to deal with social problems to a fraction of the extent we know how to engineer matter?
Why do we speak more persuasively to steel and stone than we do to our own species?

A